Jerusalem Judaism Christianity Islam Strange, John
Publication date: 2014
Document version Early version, also known as pre-print
Citation for published version (APA): Strange, J. (2014). Jerusalem: Judaism Christianity Islam. Publikationer fra Det Teologiske Fakultet Vol. 55 No. 55
Download date: 05. okt.. 2021 ISBN 978-87-91838-92-7 John Strange
JOHN STRANGE Jerusalem Judaism Christianity Islam
JOHN STRANGE Jerusalem. Judaism Christianity Islam Judaism
Jerusalem Judaism Christianity Islam
Publikationer fra Det Teologiske Fakultet 55 ISBN 978-87-91838-92-7 John Strange
JOHN STRANGE Jerusalem Judaism Christianity Islam
JOHN STRANGE Jerusalem. Judaism Christianity Islam Judaism
Jerusalem Judaism Christianity Islam
Publikationer fra Det Teologiske Fakultet 55
Jerusalem
Judaism Christianity Islam
1 Jerusalem
Judaism Christianity Islam
John Strange
This English edition is dedicated to my Christian friends in Jerusalem
Det Teologiske Fakultet Afdeling for Bibelsk Eksegese Københavns Universitet 2014
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Jerusalem. Judaism Christianity Islam Publikationer fra Det Teologiske Fakultet 55
Licensed under CreativeCommons John Strange
ISBN: 978-87-91838-92-7 (pdf)
Udgivet af Det Teologiske Fakultet Københavns Universitet Købmagergade 44-46 1150 København K
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Contents
Preface
1 Introduction p. 8
2 Jerusalem in the Bronze Age p. 15
3 Jerusalem in the Iron Age p. 25
4 Jerusalem from the Babylonian conquest to Herod p. 41
5 From Herod to Constantine p. 58
6 Christian Jerusalem p. 69
7 Islamic Jerusalem p. 83
8 Crusaders and Ayyubids p. 96
9 Jerusalem from the Mamluks to Napoleon p. 103
10 Modern Jerusalem p. 109
11 The Mandate and Jerusalem under Jordan p. 114
12 Epilogue p. 123
13 Further reading p. 127
Important years p. 134
List of literature p. 135
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Preface
This small book has grown out of many years of work. I visited Jerusalem for the first time in 1958 when I worked as a volunteer at Kibbutz Ayyelet Hashachar in Galilee, when I also had the opportunity to work as a volunteer at the excavations of Hazor under Yigael Yadin and Trude Dothan. Visiting Jerusalem I could stand on the roof of Notre Dame de France where the green line cut through the middle of the building, and like the crusaders on Mount Scopus get a view of the Old City; but it was closed country to me, Jerusalem was part of Jordan. Later, from April 1963 to April 1964, after my theological studies in Copenhagen, I studied Semitic languages and archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. During this time I had, as a foreign resident, the opportunity to obtain a laissez-passer and visit the Old City three days at Christmas time.
In 1964, from July to November, I became attached to Kathleen M. Kenyon’s Jerusalem- excavations as a site supervisor. She taught me archaeological field-work and but also love of Jerusalem, its history and archaeology. We worked from 5 am until 1.45 pm. In the afternoon I either visited the Rockefeller Museum to study pottery or the École Biblique to study the history and archaeology of Jerusalem in the library there, the best in Jerusalem, Jordan. I worked as site supervisor beneath Macalisters tower on the south east hill, Ophel, where I was lucky enough to find the oldest Iron Age house in the city. A couple of years later, in 1967, this time from August to November after the 6-Day War and the Israeli occupation, I worked with Douglas Tushingham in the Armenian Garden in the southwestern corner of the Old City, and again I studied the archaeology of Jerusalem in the afternoons.
Since then I have conducted several tours to Jerusalem for students of theology as well as for pilgrims and ordinary tourists; each time it has been a great and moving event. And several times also I have troubled my students with lectures and seminars on the archaeology and history of Jerusalem.
5 So this book is the fruit of many years of study and travel. It is not an academic book, part of the scientific discourse, also in the sense that the book does not contain proper documentation in notes; but of course much academic work lies behind the text. It is a personal view of the history of Jerusalem and the meaning of this history, and I pray the reader to take it as such. The book is – of course – a product of my profession as teacher in Biblical Archaeology at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen and is primarily an archaeological-historical work, but it is certainly also influenced by my theological engagement, both as a teacher at the theological faculty and as a pastor in the Danish Lutheran Church and padre in the army. I wish to give my thanks to all the students of the archaeology and history of Jerusalem who have, by their published research on which I have drawn, contributed to the book. I apologize and hope to be forgiven that I do not name them and acknowledge them in detail, the list of literature at the end of the book shows how many they are. Also I thank my collegues, both at my university but also abroad at congresses, where I have lectured and learned a lot from their criticism. And I feel a gratitude to my students at university and at the Open University who through the years have forced me to rethink the problems of the history of Jerusalem again and again. Special thanks are due to Kay Prag who let me use an unpublished MS on early Jerusalem, and my collegue Mogens Müller who read the Danish version and found numerous errors and inconsistencies. And thanks are due to the institutions and scholars who gave permission to use texts or pictures, these thanks go especially to the Danish Bible Society for their permission to use maps from the Bible Atlas. But first and foremost I wish to thank my wife Lisbeth. We fell in love in Jerusalem more than 30 years ago, and she has with generosity and hard work contributed to the making of this book over the years. Finally I owe thanks to all my friends in Jerusalem, especially my Christian friends to whom I dedicate the book.
Copenhagen March 2008
6 The book was written in Danish and issued at the Danish publisher "Multivers" in Copenhagen in 2007 (ISBN 978-87-7917-130-5). I ventured to make an English translation myself. It proved, however, impossible to find a publisher willing to publish it in English, and I laid the MS aside.
Recently I was made aware of the possibilities on the web-net, so I now venture to publish it in this form. I have, for reasons of copyrights, omitted most of the illustrations in the Danish edition, only some maps and plans, necessary for the reading of the book, are given, for which I thank Det Danske Bibelselskab for permission to bring.
I have not altered the text to bring it up to date, except additions to chapter 13: Further Reading. All additions are clearly marked as such to indicate that I have not used insights from these books and papers in the proper text. I beg the possible reader to indulge my English. I thank The Theological Faculty of the University of Copenhagen for giving me the opportunity to publish this work on its web-site.
Copenhagen 2014
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1
Remember the days of old, Think of the many generations long ago: ask your father to recount it and your elders to tell you the tale.1
Introduction The city of Jerusalem is unique in the sense that three world religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all claim it as one of its most important holy places, in Judaism together with Hebron and Sefat, in Christianity together with Bethlehem and Rome, and in Islam together with Mecca and Medina and Hebron. The political situation is complex with an ideology of nationalism among the Jews of Israel, claiming the city and its surroundings as the capital of Israel, a claim supported by Jews in the whole Western world as well as many others; on the other hand the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the occupied territories claim the city as their capital in a future state, a claim supported by the Arabs and most Muslims of the world. Both parties thus claim sovereignty over the city. On the other hand the claim of Christianity on Jerusalem is today more spiritual, but the city is still regarded as the Holy City, although such a claim to my mind is contrary to a universalistic and monotheistic religion and may be regarded as religious atavism. This may be seen alone from the Gospel of John where Jesus talks to a Samaritan woman: “Believe me, said Jesus, the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship without knowing what you worship, while we worship what we know. It is from the Jews that salvation comes. But the time approaches, indeed it is already here, when those who are real worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Such are the worshippers whom the Father wants. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4, 21-24).
But certainly it was not always so, also Christians have conducted bloody wars for the possession of Jerusalem, and between the Christian communities there has habitually been strife for the possession of the various holy places like the Holy Sepulchre. Accordingly the thought of some
1 Deuteronomy 32,7.
8 kind of internationalisation of Jerusalem is still voiced by the large churches. On the other hand large numbers of Christians, especially Bible fundamentalists, support Israel’s claim on Jerusalem to such a degree that these groups together with the Jewish minority sometimes seem to have made the United States’ Government pawn its foreign policy with the Israeli government.
The aim of this book is through an investigation of the history of Jerusalem from its beginning around 3500 BC to explain, how this situation has come about. How is it that a city of originally no importance, a city which was not lying on any trade route and possessed no hinterland, but on the contrary is situated in an inaccessible mountain area far from the trunk roads and far from the great and important states in the Classical Near East, has acquired this immeasurable importance?
The history of Jerusalem is an entangled history with its roots many places in the Mediterranean and also beyond, in Europe, Asia and America. The record of this history is based upon several kinds of documentation, primarily on what we would consider proper historical documents, i.e. documentation in writing, preferably contemporaneous with the events described, documentation which can be tried with historical criticism.
Furthermore the record is also based on archaeological material, not the least in connection with the oldest part of the history of Jerusalem where written documents either are completely lacking or are so few and equivocal, that they give meaning only by being elucidated by archaeological finds, or where the archaeological finds seem to have priority and will correct the written material. Of course also from later periods in the history of the city archaeological material is important to the understanding of the historical events and will be used.
Written material which cannot be tried by source criticism or verified by other material will, however, also be used. I am convinced that an event may very well have taken place, even if it is not always documented in verifiable historical documents, if the event seems probable and fits into the historical picture. After all, any archaeological and historical exposé is a construction, not even a re-construction, albeit sometimes close to the real history, because our material is always wanting and pointing in many directions, if it is not outright self-contradictory. We never know the reality behind the documents and the finds. Historical writing is not science in the manner of natural sciences. We do not have verifiable or falsifiable experiments or observations in our kind of work.
9 Archaeology lies within the humanities; and if I should compare the archaeological work with anything, it would rather be the creative process, lying behind a painting or a drawing, or perhaps a historical novel, a romance, or a film. Of course, this does not mean that you can write anything you like; we are all bound by the conventions, by the rules, by the paradigms and techniques of the academic pursuit.
Likewise it is my belief that mythological narratives and sagas have as great an importance and reality for the understanding of history as for example a wall from the Middle Bronze Age. If it is told that David assembled Israel and made Jerusalem its capital, this story is in its own way an historical fact – at least a cultural historical fact, which has historical repercussions and is important for the understanding of the history of Jerusalem; David’s conquering of Jerusalem has after all brought with it even two anniversaries in the 1990s, celebrated in Israel.
In this book I use Palestine as a geographical designation for the land both east and west of river Jordan. Cisjordan will be used for the areas west of river Jordan, today the modern state Israel and the occupied territories; and Transjordan for the areas east of river Jordan, the Dead Sea and Southern Ghor, the occupied Jaulan in southwestern part of Syria (called Golan by the Israelis) and the kingdom of Jordan. I use the term The Northern Kingdom for the kingdom of Israel existing from the former half of the 9. cent. BC until its destruction by Assyria in 722 BC with Samaria as its capital, and I use The Southern Kingdom for Judah, existing from at least the 9. cent. BC until 587 BC with Jerusalem as its capital. Of course I also use the names Israel and Judah where these names cannot be confused with modern names. Other names are explained in the text or are self- explanatory; thus the name Palestine is used for both Cisjordan and Transjordan, corresponding to the Classical use of the term from 135 AD on. As it can be seen I use BC and AD and not modern anti-Christian and timid transforms.
The archaeology of Jerusalem has been explored since 1867 when Charles Warren on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund began excavations close to Haram al-Sharif (or just Haram, also called the Temple Mount) and continued his excavations until 1870. In the ca. 150 years since these excavations virtually countless excavations and surveys have been carried out in and around the city. Among the most important archaeologists I would mention R.A.S. Macalister and J.G. Duncan 1923-25, C.N. Johns 1930-47, K.M. Kenyon and D. Tushingham 1961-67, B. Mazar 1968-78,
10 N.Avigad 1969-82, Y. Shilo 1978-84, D. Bahat and M. Broshi 1970-71; but also C. Wilson 1863- 68, C. Clermont-Ganneau 1870-74 and 1881-83, L.H. Vincent 1900-1932, and the surveys of the British School of Archaeology in the 1970s and 1980s should be mentioned for their contributions to the building history of Jerusalem. K.M. Kenyon and Y. Shilo who excavated on Ophel, south of the present walls of Jerusalem, and D. Tushingham and N. Avigad who excavated in the Old City inside the walls, should be singled out, because they together for the first time brought the archaeology and the history of the older Jerusalem on a firm basis in the period after 1961.
The archaeological and historical periods in this book are the following: Stone Age 1.800.000 - 4500 BC Chalcolithic Age 4500 - 3650 BC Early Bronze Age 3650 - 2300 BC Intermediate Period 2300 - 2000 BC Middle Bronze Age 2000 - 1500 BC Late Bronze Age 1500 - 1150 BC Intermediate Period2 1150 - 950 BC Iron Age 950 - 587 BC Babylonian/Persian Period 587 - 330 BC Hellenistic Period 330 - 67 BC Roman Period 67 BC - 325 AD Byzantine Period 325 - 638 AD Arab Period 638 - 1099 AD Crusader Period 1099 - 1187 AD Mamluk Period 1187 - 1517 AD Ottoman Period 1517 - 1917 AD Mandate 1917 - 1948 AD Partitioned 1948 - 1967 AD United politically 1967 AD
It is my conviction that the overwhelming importance Jerusalem has in our minds was created in Antiquity, in the period from ca. 600 BC until ca. 700 AD, and that the later fights for the
2 This period is normally called Iron Age I.
11 possession of the city are but later consequences of early developments. Because of this the main part of the book deals with this early period. But I follow the development in the history of the city up to our time, to 1967 when Jerusalem was reunited, and the Arab part of the city was occupied by Israel. The later developments are in my opinion too close to us to make any reliable historical construction, and at the same time the events are so bound up with religious and political bias in the mind of most people that the period will not be described here.
Today (2008) Jerusalem is a sprawling city with more than 650.000 inhabitants. For most of the city’s long history, however, the city was confined to “The Old City”, the city within the walls erected in their present state by Süleyman the Magnificent in the years 1537-39 AD, although the oldest town was situated outside the present walls south of Haram. Even if the city has changed over the years, it may be useful to summarize the topography of the Old City and its principal public buildings today already now.
Fig. 1 Jerusalem's gates and principal monuments
12 The city is rhomboid, around 1 km square. It is divided into four quarters: the Christian Quarter around the Holy Sepulchre in the north-western part, the Arab Quarter in the north-eastern part, the Jewish Quarter west of the temple terrace below the Haram and finally the Armenian Quarter in the south-western part of the city.
The city has seven gates of which four are old, here mentioned clockwise beginning at the north- western corner of the city: against the north New Gate from ca.1900 AD, next Damascus Gate, also called Shechem Gate or Bab el-Amud, the Gate of the Pillar, then Herod’s Gate; to the east St. Stephen’s Gate or Lion Gate, the name derived from the two lions in relief above the gate, it is also called Bab Sitte Mirjam, Lady Mary’s Gate, because it opens towards the Kedron Valley with the tomb of Mary, also to the east lies The Golden Gate, it was built in the Byzantine period and led from the valley up to the Haram in the Byzantine and Early Arab periods, but it has been walled up several hundred years ago; to the south lies Dung Gate through which the waste was taken out to be burnt in the Valley of Hinnom, next Zion Gate, because Zion was in later periods wrongly placed on the south-western hill; it is also called David’s Gate, because it leads to the Tomb of King David, since Antiquity believed to lie on Mount Zion; and finally we have Jaffa Gate or the Western Gate in the western wall.
From Damaskus Gate leading towards south we have a straight street all the way through the city, it is the old Cardo, built under Hadrian after 135 AD; roughly parallel to this Cardo runs another “cardo” El-Wad, leading from the Damascus Gate through the old Tyropoion Valley. Across the Cardo lies David Street, the old Decumanus, leading from the Jaffa Gate down to the Haram, where Cardo and Decumanus crossed was the so-called Tetrapylon, the centre of Hadrian’s city Aelia Capitolina. From Stephan’s Gate up to el-Wad lies a street, today called Via Dolorosa, and from there with a slight parallel shift to the south it continues up to Cardo.
Three great monuments in Jerusalem should be mentioned: first and foremost Haram al-Sharif, Herod’s old temple terrace, dominating the south-eastern part of the city with its vast space, the largest open space in any city from Antiquity; below that lies the open square in front of the Wailing Wall, or just the Wall, as it is called by the Jewish citizens. In the western part of the city next to the Jaffa Gate lies the Citadel, built by the Crusaders and the Mamluks on the site of Herod’s old
13 palace. And, finally, in the Christian quarter lies the Holy Sepulchre, built next to the Anastasis Rotunda over the tomb of Christ.
Jerusalem has been known under many names. In oldest written records mentioning the city, the so- called Execration Texts from the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (around 1800 BC), it is called rw-u-sh( )l-m-m or raw-u-sh( )l-m-m, possibly to be read Rushalimum which has been understood to mean “l-m-m’s Hill”, but this translation may be due to an Egyptian etymology of a foreign word, an etymology which has also determined the Egyptian spelling. In letters from the archive, found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, and containing the royal chancellery’s correspondence from the 14 cent. BC and written in cuneiform writing in a kind of Babylonian, the city is called Urusalim, and later, in an Assyrian inscription from the first Millenium it is called Uru-salimmu, probably Salem’s City.
In the Old Testament the city is called Jerushalayim, possibly an artificial vocalisation of an earlier Jerusalem, as it may perhaps be deduced from the Greek translation, the Septuagint, from the last centuries BC. The connection between Uru-salimmu and Jerusalem is not clear; “jeru” might perhaps be connected with jrw – to establish, to build, in which case Jerusalem might have the meaning “Foundation of Salem”, but possibly it could also be a garbled version of Ir-Salem and be the equivalent of Uru-salimmu.
The Romans called the city Jerusalem, later in the Christian church sometimes written Hierosolyma, The Holy Solyma, an artificial name which is perhaps a pun on Salem from Genesis 14,18. After Hadrian conquered the city in 135 AD and made it into a Roman colony, he renamed the city Aelia Capitolina after his name Publius Aelius Hadrianus, but the city regained its old name in 325, at the council at Nicea.
The Muslims called the temple mound after they conquered it in 638 AD, Bait el-Maqdis – the Holy House, because it had been the site of Solomon’s temple, later this name became the name of the whole city, usually from the 10 cent. AD shortened to al-Quds; other names were Ilia after Aelia Capitolina, or al-Balat from Latin Palatium – royal residence, again probably because of Solomon who plays an enormous role in Arab Palestinian folklore. And then of course they also called the city Jerusalem, in the oldest Arab texts Urishallum.
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Lo, the miserable Asiatic, He is wretched because of the place he’s in: Short of water, bare of wood, Its paths are many and painful because of mountains.3
Jerusalem in the Bronze Age Jerusalem’s early history was created by its geographical situation. The site of Jerusalem lies in Palestine, the land-bridge connecting the Nile Valley in Africa with the Egyptian civilisation to Mesopotamia in Asia with the Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations, and across which the trunk roads between the two areas ran from the II millennium BC on. But still the site of the town was situated off the beaten track.
Palestine may be divided into four zones from west to east. 1 The Coastal Zone stretches from Lebanon to the south getting broader towards the southern part of Palestine. Its flat character is broken by the Carmel promontory reaching from the Central Mountain Range into the Mediterranean. 2 The Central Mountain Range. It is a continuation of the Lebanon Mountain Range, in the north it consists of the mountains of Galilee, and continues in the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, south of it we find the steppe of Negeb. It is broken by the great valley of Jezreel, making an easy throughway from the Mediterranean Sea to the interior of the country on the other side of the river Jordan. 3 The Jordan Valley which is a small part of the Great Rift Valley beginning in Turkey and continuing in the Biqaa between Lebanon and Antilebanon. From the southern end of this range, Mount Hermon, it continues with the river Jordan in the middle of the valley, from Hermon in the north through Lake Hule to the Sea of Gennesaret, goes on to the Dead Sea, from there the valley continues through the Arabah Valley, the Red Sea and ends in Central Africa. 4 The Transjordan plateau, a continuation of Antilebanon range, in the north the Jaulan, further south the mountains of Jordan. In the east it fades into the Syro-Arabian Desert.
3 Instruction of Merikare (Lichtheim 1997: 64).
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Fig. 2 Palestine from the Southwest
Jerusalem is situated in the northern Judæa on the watershed of a mountain massif with deep, narrow and inaccessible valleys between mountains which were in Antiquity covered with a dense forest of evergreen oak forcing the north-south-going traffic between Mesopotamia and Egypt either to the trunk road along the coast or to the so-called King’s Highway on the Transjordanian plateau where the landscape is even. Only rather late, in the Iron Age, a north-south-going road was created along the water shed on the top of the Central Range. At the same time the traffic from the Mediterranean to the markets in Transjordan passed north of Jerusalem either through the Valley of Jezreel (the principal route) or further south from the Coastal Plain at Latrun across the mountains to Gibeon, Ai and down to Jericho. All traffic avoided the area around Jerusalem, and there was no reason to build a town or marketplace at the site.
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Fig. 3 Roads in Palestine (courtesy Multivers)
The landscape around Jerusalem, with its deep valleys, had but a few small areas where it was possible to till the soil and establish a permanent settlement. And also Jerusalem was situated right on the watershed with the result that the whole landscape east of the city is a desert. The Mediterranean climate with its drought in the summer (there is virtually no rain from April until November) and a rainy season in the winter makes it even more difficult to sustain agriculture. In order to cultivate the land you need access to either a perennial spring or to cisterns capable of collecting water in the rainy season and keep it through the dry summer; and this technology was developed only in the Middle Bronze Age. The only permanent spring in Jerusalem, the spring which in the Bronze- and Iron Ages was the most important water supply, was the spring of Gihon, or Ain Umm al-Daraj, emerging in a subterranean basin in the Kedron valley at the foot of Ophel. At the same time it should be remembered that the Kedron valley itself carried water every winter. But even so the conditions for a permanent settlement were unfavourable, as the Gihon brings its water only intermittently and is very difficult to control.
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Fig. 4 The topography of Jerusalem
Jerusalem was built on two hills: 1 The Eastern Hill, a ridge in the Central Mountain Range through Palestine; on this hill lay the Bezetha, Haram al-Sharif, Ophel, between Haram and the so-called Nehemiah’s Tower, and finally the south-eastern hill, the original David-city Zion, stretching down to the Pool of Siloam, where the Kedron valley and the Hinnom valley merge. 2 The other ridge, the Western Hill, with in the north the Christian Quarter, south of David Street the Armenian and the Jewish quarters and furthest south the south- western Hill, the modern Mount Zion south of the present city wall and north of the Hinnom Valley.
18 Some valleys are important for the topography: 1 Between the two hills lies the Tyropoion Valley, today nearly filled up by debris from 3000 years of settlement; it runs from Damascus Gate along el-Wad – (the valley) under the south-eastern corner of the Haram and down to Siloam where it spills into the Kedron Valley. 2 A transverse valley from the Hinnom Valley to the east along David Street, where it spills into the Tyropoionom Valley north of the Citadel. 3 A transverse valley from the Kedron Valley under the north-eastern corner of the Haram; it has two branches, one runs towards the north-west towards Bezetha; the other runds towards the south-west, just north of the highest point of the Haram with the Dome of the Rock, and it ends in a artificial moat cut in the rock and leading to the Tyropoion Valley. This transverse valley and moat was undoubtedly the northern limit of the temple mount in the Iron Age and the Hellenistic Period until Herod extended the temple enclosure towards the north to its present size. Just north of the Haram there is a rock which, with its 750 m above Sea Level, towered over the temple platform. Today a boys’ school is lying there.
Traces of man have been found around Jerusalem already from around 400.000 years ago, later also from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Ages, but the settlement was seasonal and anyway sporadic. But in the IV millennium at the beginning of Early Bronze Age I ca 3650 BC a permanent settlement grew up west and south-west of the spring of Gihon; the extent of the settlement is uncertain, but the archaeological finds come from an area measuring 300 m by 100 m. The settlement fits into the settlement pattern of the period in the southern Levant, all over the landscape we find small open villages. Also burial caves with ceramics as offering gifts from the period after ca. 3650 BC were found near Jerusalem.
From an archaeological perspective the village was short-lived, it was abandoned at the beginning of Early Bronze Age II (at the very latest shortly after ca. 3050 BC), again in accordance with the usual settlement pattern in the southern Levant, where small open villages were replaced by fewer but fortified settlements, not, however, in the case of Jerusalem. In this period the most important city-states emerged in Palestine, e.g. Shimron, later replaced by Megiddo (Tell el-Mutesellim), Beth Shean (Beisan), Hazor (Tell Waqqas) and Dan (Tell el-Qadi) in the north; Apheq (Tell Ras el-Ain),
19 later replaced by Gezer (Tell Abu Shusha), and Tell el-Fara’ah in the middle of the land; and Tell Yarmut (Khirbet Yarmuk) and Tell Erani (Tell Sheik Abu el-Areine), later replaced by Lachich (Tell el-Duweir), and Arad (Tell Arad) in the south. But Jerusalem was not rebuilt, which demonstrates that Jerusalem was not a place with natural means of communications nor with a sufficient hinterland to support a city. On the whole the landscape around and south of Jerusalem was sparingly inhabited throughout the Bronze Age.
The following more than a thousand years, from ca. 3000 – 1800 BC, Jerusalem and its closest surroundings were practically uninhabited, some burials from the first Intermediate Period have been uncovered, the inhabitants were either nomadic or they had a permanent settlement somewhere else.
Fig. 5 Jerusalem in the Bronze Age
Only in the Middle Bronze Age II ca. 1800 BC Jerusalem was again built up, and this time as a fortified city above the spring of Gihon. It is around the same time that Jerusalem is mentioned in the Egyptian Execration Texts as an enemy of the Egyptian king and enters history based on written documents.
The city was situated on the top and partly down the slope of Ophel and was protected by a heavy city wall, two thirds down the slope, which safeguarded the access to the spring of Gihon, through the so-called Warren’s Shaft, leading down to a system of tunnels and reservoirs for keeping the water coming from the intermittent spring. The inhabitants of Jerusalem were fairly wealthy, as seen from the quality of the pottery found, mostly in burials, from ca 1800-1700 BC.
20
Surveys around Jerusalem have demonstrated that the city’s hinterland was thinly populated, only a few villages are known, but apparently Jerusalem was capital in a kind of city state and trading post for the surrounding villages. But again the city was short-lived, after a century the settlement disappears, apparently there is still scant opportunity to uphold a city in this remote and thinly populated part of Palestine.
In the following archaeological age, The Late Bronze Age (1500-1150 BC), when Palestine had been conquered by Tutmosis III in 1459 BC and was part of the Egyptian Empire in Asia, the existence of Jerusalem as a city is disputed. Only after 1400 BC there is a settlement; Jerusalem is mentioned in the Amarna-lettters, an archive found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt whereto Akhnaton, whose earlier official name was Amenophis IV (1352-1336 BC), had transferred his capital. Among other letters the international correspondence from his reign and from part of the reign of his predecessor Amenophis III (1390-52 BC) was recovered, among the most interesting letters from our point of view, letters to and from Palestine, both east and west of the Jordan river. In these letters Jerusalem appears as Uru-Shalimmu with a ruler called Abdi-Hepa. The place was obviously fortified and was within reach from Gezer (Gazru) in the Shephalah, the low mountains west of the Judean massif, and Keilah (Qiltu) further to the southwest and Shechem (Sakmu) in the mountains of Ephraim to the north; further away from Uru-Shalimmu lay Sheir (Seru), undoubtedly the land east of The Dead Sea, as may be seen from other Egyptian texts from this period and later.
All this fits Jerusalem very well. But on the other hand there is very little archaeological evidence for a settlement. Some burial caves have been found, both on the Mount of Olives from between 1600 and 1300 BC with 2 % imported pottery from Cyprus, furthermore a pit with pottery and a scarab from the Late Bronze Age II (between 1400 and 1150 BC), and some settlement in the Emeq Rephaim southwest of the city. Finally debris from an Egyptian temple from the XIX Dynasty (from the end of the 13. cent. BC) was found near the École Biblique (The Dominican Bible Institute north of the Damascus Gate). On the other hand no pottery from the Late Bronze Age has ever been found in the excavations on Ophel. This meagre result may, however, be explained partly by chance of finds, and partly by the fact that at the place where the most important excavations took place, in Kenyon’s great trench on the eastern slope of Ophel, there had been a great defile made by erosion, which in the period before the Iron Age had taken all the culture layers down the
21 slope to the bottom of the Kedron Valley, a defile later in the Iron Age repaired by building terraces (see below).
Putting the whole material together, the best explanation seems to me to be a fortress or a fortified agricultural establishment under a governor, who, from a local point of view was a kind of king, but from the Egyptian point of view a public officer, a mukhtar. Both in Transjordan and in the Mountain Range of Cisjordan the most important industry in the Late Bronze Age and the following period was olive oil which was collected in key cities and from there transported in special large jars on camels, two on each camel, to the cities on the Mediterranean coast and from there freighted by ship either to the south to Egypt or to the north to Northern Syria, Asia Minor and possibly the islands in the Aegean Sea. Jerusalem might very well have been such a key city or trading station for the collection of commodities for export with an Egyptian governor and garrison.
The name Uru-Shalimmu probably should be translated “the city of Salem”. Shalimmu/Salem was a widely known Semitic god in the second Millennium BC, possibly a god of fortune. In the Old Testament Jerusalem is called Salem a couple of times, for example Genesis 14,18 in the story of Abraham and Melchizedek; but this story presupposes a connection between Abraham and Jerusalem, and should accordingly be dated to the Persian period (after 538 BC), when there was a wish to connect Jerusalem and its temple mount, Mount Moriah, to the patriarch Abraham; he was originally a tribal hero from Hebron and only in the postexilic period made into a common Jewish ancestor and symbol. There is no reason at all to suppose that a historical Abraham visited Jerusalem in the Late Bronze Age.
The Bronze Age terminated after 1150 BC. The reasons for this change in culture are not yet fully explained, but all over Palestine the Late Bronze Age was a period of increasing abatement. Decisive for the historical development was the Egyptian withdrawal from its Asiatic empire in the XX Dynasty. The Egyptian suzerainty became limited to the Coastal Plain, the Valley of Jezreel, the lowland around the Sea of Gennesaret and the northern part of the Jordan valley south of the lake. In the north a few larger cities survived, for example Bet-Shan in the Jordan Valley and Megiddo at the important pass across Mount Carmel controlling the trunk road to the Syria and Mesopotamia. In the Coastal Plain from Carmel to the Brook of Egypt (Wadi Ghazze) a group of
22 conquered peoples from the north, the so-called Sea Peoples, of whom the best known are the Philistines, were settled as Egyptian vassals.
In this Intermediate Period between the Bronze Age and the true Iron Age new villages were built both north and south of Jerusalem. In the beginning it was semi-nomadic population groups, that is groups with seasonal herding of cattle, mostly sheep and goats, but also some extensive agriculture; these groups have aptly been called di-morphic. And also Ophel was now resettled.
On Ophel in Kenyon’s great trench, where I was lucky enough to be site supervisor in the 1964- season, I found below a series of terraces a house built on a thin layer of soil, just above bedrock, with a broken storage jar, a so-called “Collared-Rim-Jar”, which was used for storage, but also for transport of commodities on camels.
This house was in the first, preliminary, publications of the excavations dated incorrectly to the Middle Bronze Age; later investigations, however, have established that the jar and other pottery on the floor of the house, and consequently at least the use of the building, should be dated to the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages, somewhere in the 12. or 11. century BC. Under the floor some sherds of broken pottery from the Middle Bronze Age IIB was found. This dates from the earlier city on Ophel and may have contributed to the first, incorrect dating. The size and the function of the house could not be established, and it was not possible to enlarge the trench.
On top of the (ruined) house a great system of terraces was later built filling the erosion defile on the slope making it possible to build there. Probably the terraces were foundations for a fortress on top of Ophel. This fortress should defend Jerusalem and its water supply against an enemy, just at this time Egypt lost the control over large areas of Palestine on both sides of the river, and it makes good sense to build a fortress to defend the Egyptian commercial interests there. Because of this it is reasonable to assume that the builders were Egyptian, while it is not possible to make a more accurate identification. The inhabitants of Jerusalem, when David according the Old Testament conquered the city, are called Jebusites in the Bible, but this ethnic name is not known from other texts and could be fictional.
23 On the contrary it is possible to give a proposal for the identity of the enemies of Jerusalem. From the time, when the Egyptian kings tried to keep their hold on Asia, we have a monument, a victory stele with an inscription made by Merenptah (1213-02 BC) in his fifth year of the reign. The end of the inscription is the so-called “Hymn of Victory”:
“The (foreign) chieftains lie prostrate, saying: Peace. Not one lifts his head among the Nine Bows. Libya is captured, while Hatti is pacified. Canaan is plundered, Ashkelon is carried off, and Gezer is captured. Yenoam is made into non-existence; Israel is wasted, its seed is not; And Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt. All lands united themselves in peace.”4
Even if this text is not a historical text in the usual meaning of the word, but a propaganda-text, aiming to show Pharaoh’s domination of the entire world, it is highly interesting in connection with the history of Jerusalem, because it is the oldest text mentioning Israel. An analysis of the text shows that “Israel” which with a determinative is mentioned as a group of people, not a state or a city, must have lived in the highlands in the mountains north of Jerusalem. They must, as far as I can judge, somehow be connected with the semi-nomads, which I mentioned above as the group of people, which settled in the mountains in the Intermediate period. They must be the people, Jerusalem had to build defences against; and it is in my opinion unreasonable not to presume a connection between this group of people and the later inhabitant in Israel/The Northern Kingdom, which we know as Israel in the Books of Kings in the Old Testament with their capital first in Tirzah and later in Samaria.
On the other hand we do not the name of the semi-nomads in the area around and south of Jerusalem; they will, however, play a role in the following period, the proper Iron Age.
4 Taken from Hoffmeier 2000. The stele was erected to commemorate a victory over the Libyans. Hatti is the Hittite kingdom in Asia Minor. Canaan is the Egyptian name for Palestine. Ashkelon, Gezer and Yenoam are city states in Palestine. Hurru is the Egyptian name for Syria.
24 3
The Lord said that he would dwell in thick darkness. I have built thee an exalted house, a place for thee to dwell in for ever.5 Jerusalem in the Iron Age After the year 1000 BC (10.-9. cent.) in the Iron Age (1000/950-587 BC) a huge sloping glacis made of large boulders was built on top of the terraces from the transition period, it was at least 40 m long and 27 m high; since Macalister found it in 1923, it has been called the Jebusite Ramp, named by Macalister after 2. Sam. 5, 5-9.
The glacis served as foundations for a monumental building on top of Ophel, probably a palace or perhaps rather a fortress, and possibly there was also a defence wall surrounding the town. This kind of monumental buildings is known also from other sites in Palestine, for example from Lakish and Beersheba west of river Jordan and from Hesban in Transjordan. They point to a period when societies were organised in greater units, first chiefdoms and later kingdoms or states6, the beginnings of territorial states, as they are known from the Old Testament texts. In Western Palestine in the Iron Age we find Israel or the Northern Kingdom with its capital first at Tirzah, today’s Tell el Far’ah, later at Samaria, today’s Sebastiyye; and Judah or the Southern Kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. In Transjordan we find Ammon with its capital Rabbat-Ammon, today Amman; Moab with its capital at Kerak, and from a later period Edom with its capital Bosra, today Buseira. The rise of these states was possible, because Egypt had withdrawn from Asia, leaving the Levant in a power vacuum. Possibly some of the states had emerged already at the end of the Late
5 1. Kings 8,12-13. 6 ”Chiefdom” is a concept developed in modern archaeological terminology. The chiefdom is characterised by its size, 5000 – 20.000 inhabitants. Usually there is a fortified seat of power with palaces to the chief and his retinue of highly placed warriors, there is a permanently ritualised religious life with a hereditary priest (or chief-priest), often with a large-scale monument. The economy is based on central accumulation and redistribution, and there is craft specialisation. Finally the society is characterised by a site-hierarchy, i.e. some cities are more important than others. The state on the other hand is inhabited with more than 20.000 individuals. It is characterized by a class society under a king and with a real army to prop it up. The state is characterised by a centralised bureaucracy, with tribute-based taxes and laws. We find real cities, roads and frontier defences, palaces, temples and other public buildings. There is a priestly class. It is important to remember that what we would call chiefdom, texts from Antiquity will often call kingdom like in the case of David and the early state of Judah.
25 Bronze Age as a kind of vassal states, like the Philistine city states on the coastal plain, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron and Gaza, being vassals of Egypt.
It seems to me difficult, even awkward, not to connect the large monument, the Jebusite Ramp, on Ophel in Jerusalem and the small state Judah with king David, known from the Bible as the conqueror of Jebusite Jerusalem and the first real king of Judah, the ancestor and founder of “The House of David”, a dynasty seated in Jerusalem. In the last decennia the very existence of David has been put to question; but now at least the name “House of David “ has been documented on a stele, found at Tel Dan in North Israel. The stele, only partly preserved, displays an inscription in Aramaic, commemorating a victory over Israel and the House of David, probably a name for Judah. Written in Aramaic, the stele was probably set up by a king from Damascus. The stele was found reused in a wall and is difficult to date, but probably it should be dated to between 850 and 750 BC. Personally I find that the only reasonable thing to do is to connect this name with the tradition of a historical person, David, the founder of a dynasty in Jerusalem, a tradition which could have been embellished at any time in the so-called period of the Kings (ca. 900 – 587 BC) until the formation of written material, and also to connect it with the monumental buildings on Ophel, showing a central power and an elite in southern part of Palestine, as said above in the beginning as a chiefdom.
Fig. 6 Jerusalem in the Iron Age
26 Jerusalem was in its first stages primarily an administrative and military centre with public buildings; in excavations private houses have not been found to a greater extent, and the city comprised at the most 14 hectares with ca. 2000 inhabitants. David’s successors in the following centuries developed Jerusalem into a considerable city, and it is an important fact that from the time of David Jerusalem has been a permanent city, it is no longer an ephemeral settlement like the earlier Jerusalems of the Bronze Age, and several buildings have been excavated from a time later in the Iron Age. Because of all this it is proper to name King David the founder of Jerusalem. A different matter, of course, is the narratives of a greater Israel which, according to the Bible, has comprised all Palestine from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south under David and his son Solomon, who also should have controlled several vassal-states. This is according to any historical and archaeological knowledge inconceivable; it seems rather to be an ideological construction, at the earliest created after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC, when many of the inhabitants living in Israel fled to Judah and settled there; but the construction might as well have been created in the period after the Babylonian exile when the whole area west of Jordan was one administrative unit, a satrapy, in the Persian realm. And finally Solomon, bearing a name possibly derived from Jerusalem, could very well be a wholly fictitious person, created to be founder of the temple of Jerusalem and king of a great state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Assyria, a state on the Upper Euphrates, began an expansionist policy after 900 BC and eventually conquered the whole Middle East. In the 9. century northern Syria was conquered, and the subdued city states were made into Assyrian provinces, later, after 750 BC, the Assyrian kings turned to middle and southern Syria and Palestine. In the years 732-722 king Tiglat-Pileser and his successor Sargon overran the rest of Syria, first the northern parts of The Northern Kingdom/Israel in 732 and finally the rest of the kingdom around Samaria in 722. Towards 701 BC Assyria threatened to conquer Judah, after the Assyrian king had annexed the coastal plain around Ashdod in 713 BC. Under the impact of these events the defence of Jerusalem was strengthened.
From these years dates a great water tunnel, the so-called Hezekiah's tunnel, leading the water of the Spring of Gihon right under the mountain to its southern end, where the Kidron Valley and the Hinnom valley meet, probably into a great subterranean reservoir, which was subsequently destroyed, presumably in connection the capture of Jerusalem by Nebukadnezar in 598 BC. This
27 tunnel is mentioned in 2. Kings 20, 20 as part of Jerusalem’s defences built by King Hezekiah (727- 698 BC) in the years towards 701 BC. At the same time, however, Warren’s shaft was still in use.
Further north, on Ophel just south of the Haram, the ruins of a gate area for a palace have been excavated; and on the Western Hill in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem the excavators found a great city wall, 7 m broad (hence its nickname “The Broad Wall”) and at least 65 m long, it has been dated to the 8. century BC and might very well be part of Hezekiah’s defence works against an Assyrian invasion. Close by a tower was found from a slightly later period, possibly part of a gate leading to the north; here arrow points, probably used in the siege of Jerusalem either in 598 BC or 587 BC, were found.
The Assyrian king Sennacherib attacked Judah in 701 BC and conquered the land. Jerusalem was besieged, but not captured, probably because the city was ransomed with three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold, i.e. fifteen tons of silver and one and a half ton of gold (1. Kings 18, 4), a fabulous amount which is, however, corroborated in the Assyrian annals.
But after these events and the salvage of Jerusalem, a legend was created, which is told both in 2. Kings 18-19 and Isaiah 36-37: God saved the city in which his temple was built, he sent an angel who killed 185.000 men in the Assyrian camp, whereupon Sennacherib returned to Assyria. This legend took on an immense importance, Jerusalem was from now on considered to be impregnable: As long as Jahwe dwelt in his temple, no enemy could capture the city. The legend acquired especially great importance during the later Babylonian march against Jerusalem after 600 BC, but also for later theological thinking about on the city and its holiness.
Other cites in Judah, for example Lakish and Beersheba, were destroyed, and Jerusalem was from now on the only large city in Judah. The population of Jerusalem was growing very much during the reign of Hezekiah. Probably a large number of refugees from Israel, the Northern Kingdom, fled to the south in connection with the fall of the kingdom in 722 and the destruction of its cities, and also a number of refugees came from Judah itself in connection with the destruction of Judean cites in 701, when the Assyrian annals show that the Assyrians conquered 46 cites and gave them to the kings of Ashdod, Eqron and Gaza, the Philistine city states which had been conquered in 713 BC and had been made into an Assyrian dependancy. All these refugees tried to avoid deportation to
28 Assyrian, like large parts of the population had been deported to Northern Mesopotamia in connection with Assyria’s wars in 732 against the northern provinces of Israel and 722, when the whole state was made a province, and had been replaced with population groups from other part of the Assyrian Empire.
At the same time Judah became incorporated in the Assyrian economy, probably as a supplier of raw materials, like the states Edom in southern Jordan, which rose in connection with the Assyrian expansion, and Phoenicia, who supplied raw materials from the western markets. This caused, together with a nearly century long peace, a new prosperity which, together with the immigration, make Jerusalem into a considerable city as mentioned above.
Fig. 7 Jerusalem in the 7th Cent. BC
Archaeological excavations confirm this picture. They show a flourishing city with houses built down the eastern slope of Ophel on top of the large terraces from the early Iron Age; especially interesting are a number of buildings excavated partly by Kenyon, partly by Shiloh. In one of the building a series of weights was found making it possible to study the commercial systems of the period (the weights were in the Mesopotamian notation with 24-number-system, but were inscribed with Egyptian hieratic numbers in the decimal system). In a basement in another house, probably an archive belonging to a high official, a number of clay bullae used to seal papyri were retrieved; they
29 were inscribed with names, both first names and patronyms, in combinations known from the stories about King Josiah in 2. Kings 22-23; this is a rare example of corroboration between archaeological finds and traditional texts. Also evidence of flourishing handicrafts and a considerable import of luxury items were found.
The most important building from Iron Age Jerusalem, however, is only attested in later texts and not archaeologically. We have no tangible remains, because this building was situated below the present Haram el-Sharif, on the old site before the building of Herod’s temple, and is of course inaccessible to archaeologists. According to the Bible this temple was built by King Solomon, King David’s son and successor. This is uncertain, as many of the texts dealing with David and especially with Solomon are manifestly legendary, as mentioned above. But the temple was probably built in either the 9. or the 8. century BC, before the Assyrian expansion, which may be deduced from similarities in architecture and decoration with other temples in the Levant from this period, for instance Tell Tayanat and Hama in Syria, temples in royal cities from the Iron Age, which are known from archaeological investigations. Furthermore we have a fairly accurate description of the temple in 1. Kings 6-7. This description has been used by the author of the Book of Ezekiel, a book written in the first half of the 6. century BC, after the destruction of the temple. The description in 1. Kings must accordingly be older than the Book of Ezekiel; and as it furthermore is apparent that the author of the Book of Ezekiel has misinterpreted the text from 1. Kings, when he used it, the text of 1. Kings must lie at least some time before the Book of Ezekiel and accordingly some time before the exile. And finally the destruction of the temple is mentioned in the Babylonian Chronicle, a text recording Nebuchadnezar’s capture and destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, and must accordingly have existed before this time.
The temple of Jerusalem falls into a temple tradition in the western Semitic area, which may be seen at its earliest in Ebla, the present Tell el-Mardikh in Northern Syria shortly after 2000 BC at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. Where temples earlier had been an independent institution, as may be seen especially in Mesopotamia, it now becomes part of the royal palace, in reality a kind of chapel of the palace. Instead of the earlier temple type “Breithause” – broad-house with its entrance on the long side, it is now is usually built as a “Langhaus” – long-house with its entrance on a short side and the idol at the other end of the building. This new position of the temple as part of the royal palace mirrors the nature of kingship. The king is the son of God, he is God incarnate, most clearly
30 in Egypt, where the king was Horus Incarnate, the sun-god, but also in Mesopotamia and in the western Semitic area. It is then only natural that the main temple of a city state is built in connection with the palace, and that the temple of Jerusalem is built in a period when kingship was consolidated. The temple was built for the national god Jahwe by his son, the king of Jerusalem, the anointed, the Messiah.
The temple was built north of the city, which was situated on Ophel, south of the present city walls and close to the Spring of Gihon with the royal palace on the Jebusite Ramp. This siting is according to 2. Book of Samuel 24 due to David, who had a vision of an angel from God in connection with a plague; after this vision David bought the ground, where the angel had stood, and gave an offering on an altar which later was the alter of the temple; this is one foundation legend of the temple, but as will be seen later there is another foundation legend involving the Patriarch Abraham. Actually the temple was built there because one of the kings of Jerusalem build a new palace north of the old city, the palace whose gate complex was possibly found in excavations (cf. above). North of the place where the temple was erected there was a cross valley from the Kedron Valley, which could easily be connected with the Tyropoion Valley by an artificial dry moat and so protect the city at its weakest point. Anyway it seems that at this place there is continuity in the building history from the oldest temple from the Iron Age to the post-exilic temple, to Herod’s temple, and, after a gap in the Roman and Byzantine period, to the Dome of the Rock today. The name of the site now became Zion, Zion being the original name of the Davidic city on the south- eastern hill.
The temple itself and its decorations are copiously described in 1. Kings 6-7, and several details in the outline and decorations may be filled out from other part of the Old Testament, especially the Books of Kings, or they may be deduced from other temples from the Iron II Age, excavated in the Levant. Naturally the question, how reliable this material is, should be asked; but to me there seems not to be any compelling reason to disparage it. For one thing, as mentioned above, the text of 1. Kings 1-2 has been used by the author of the Book of Ezekiel and must accordingly come from the Iron II Age, when the temple was still standing, and anyway the temple is mentioned in Babylonian texts dealing with the destruction of Jerusalem.
31
Chapter 6: v. 2 The temple, king Solomon built for the Lord, was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits broad and thirty cubits high. v. 3 The vestibule in front of the temple hall was twenty cubits broad, fitting the breadth of the temple, and ten cubits deep in front of the temple. v. 4 He made windows with trellises in frames for the house. v. 5 Along the wall of the house he built an extension, all the way round the walls, both along the temple hall and the inner room. He built side-chambers all the way round; v. 6 the lowest side-chamber was five cubits broad, the middle six cubits broad and the upper seven cubits broad, because he made ledges on the walls all around the house in order not to make holes in the walls. v. 7 In the building of the house only undressed stones from the quarry were used; neither hammer nor chisel or any other iron tool was heard in the house, when it was built. v. 8 The entrance to the lowest side-chamber was situated on the right side of the house, and spiral stairways led to the middle, and from the middle to the third. v. 9 He finished the house, and he placed a roof of cedar beams on the house, the side-chambers and the peristyle. v. 10 He build the side-chambers of the house five cubits high, and they were fastened to the house with cedar beams. ………. v. 15 He lined the inner walls of the house with cedar boards; from the floor of the house to the roof beams he covered the inner wall with wood, and he covered the floor of the house with juniper boards. v. 16 Twenty cubits from the back wall of the house he set cedar planks from the floor to the roof beams, and inside he built the inner shrine, the Most Holy Place. v. 17 The house, the temple hall in front of the inner shrine was forty cubits long. v. 18 The cedar boards on the inside of the house were carved with flower buds and calyxes. All was cedar wood, no stone could be seen. v. 19 Inside the house he prepared the inner room to place the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord there.
32 v. 20 The inner room was twenty cubits long, twenty cubits broad and twenty cubits high. He covered it with pure gold, and he made an altar of cedar wood. v. 21 Solomon covered the inside of the house with pure gold; he drew golden chains in front of the inner shrine, and he covered it with gold. v. 22 He covered the whole house with gold, the whole house from one end to the other, and the whole altar in front of the inner shrine he covered with gold. v. 23 In the inner shrine he made two cherubim from wild olive wood, ten cubits high. v. 24 The cherub’s one wing was five cubits, and its other wing was five cubits, giving ten cubits from one wing tip to the other wing tip. v. 25 The other cherub also was ten cubits. Both cherubim had the same measure and form. v. 26 One cherub was ten cubits high, and so was the other. v. 27 He placed the cherubim in the inner shrine, with the cherubim having their wings spread out. The wing of one touched one wall, and the other cherub’s wing touched the other wall, and in the middle of the house the two (other) wings touched each other. v. 28 He covered the cherubim with gold. v. 29 Into all the walls of the house he carved pictures in relief with cherubim, palmettes and calyxes in the inner shrine as well as in the outer room. v. 30 He covered the floor of the house with gold both in the inner shrine as well as in the outer room. v. 31 The door to the inner shrine he furnished with leafs of wild olive wood; the doorposts had five recesses. v. 32 Also on the two leafs made of wild olive wood he carved pictures in relief with cherubim, palmettes and calyxes and covered them with gold, which he hammered down upon the cherubim and the palmettes. v. 33 Similarly he made the door to the temple hall with doorposts of wild olive wood with four recesses. v. 34 The two doorleafs were made of juniper wood, every leaf had two rosettes. v. 35 He carved cherubim, palmettes and calyxes, and he covered them with gold evenly laid all over the carvings. v. 36 He built the inner forecourt with three courses of ashlars and one course of cedar beams. ……….
33 Chapter 7: v. 19 The capitals on the top of the columns were shaped like lotuses; they measured four cubits. ……….. Chapter 8: v. 6 The priests brought the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its place in the inner shrine of the temple, the Most Holy Place, under the wings of the cherubim; v. 7 the cherubim had their wings spread over the place of the Ark, in such a way that the cherubim covered the Ark and its carrying poles from above. v. 8 The poles were long enough for their end to be seen from the Holy in front of the inner shrine, but they could not be seen from outside the house. They are there unto this day.7
7 Translated from the Hebrew by the author.
34
Fig. 7 (Re)construction of Solomon’s temple and palace.
35
The ground-plan of the temple is evident from vv. 2-10. The temple was a “Langhaus” with a main hall (Hebr. hekal = palace), and a transverse vestibule (Hebr. ulam ) in front of the main hall; the vestibule was furnished by two columns, supporting the lintel, forming a “bit hilani”, a monumental entrance known from palaces and temples other places in the Syro-Palestinian area in the II. and the I. millennium BC. At the rear of the main hall a wooden construction was placed (Hebr. debir), it was a cube, measuring twenty cubits on all sides; as the temple was thirty cubits high, there must have been a void above the inner shrine between it and the roof of the main hall, or the inner shrine must have been standing on a elevation, possibly the Rock, the highest place on the temple platform. Later the two rooms, ulam and hekal, together with debir were understood as three separate rooms and were called “The Vestibule”, “the Holy Place” and “the Most Holy Place” (cf.v 16 above, p.30)..
As mentioned above the temple was a “Langhaus”. Some precursors have been found in Palestine, the most important from Shechem, Megiddo and Hazor from the Middle Bronze and Late Bronze Ages; the temple in Shechem could possibly have been standing at the beginning of the Iron Age. I believe, however, that the inspiration for the building should be sought for further away, in North- and Middle Syria, where we find the same temple type in the Iron Age, notably in Tell Tayanat and Hama. The inner shrine, debir, should be understood as a model of Jahwe’s original dwelling place, a cubic-formed tent, in analogy with the shrine models in the inner rooms in Egyptian temples. The cubic form indicates that the tent had its origin in the areas east and southeast of Palestine.
It should be born in mind that the temple was but a part of a greater complex with the royal palace as its most important part; according to the Bible it took 7 years to build the temple, but 13 years to build his palace (1. Kings 6, 38 - 7, 1).
The temple was clearly, as mentioned above, a royal chapel. This becomes even more obvious, when the decorations and the furnishing inside and outside the temple are considered. In the inner shrine there were two cherubim. They were the throne of Jahwe, cf. the vision of Isaiah at his vocation in the temple: “In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple” (Book of Isaiah 6, 1).
36 In debir stood the throne of God, a throne made of cherubim on which the invisible God was sitting. Cherubim were fabulous animals, known from Western Asia in the Late Bronze and the Iron Ages; they were sphinxes, in Egypt with a human head, royal crown, artificial beard and apron, and here in the Levant also with eagles’ wings. Cherub-thrones are known from ivory and stone relief and models from the period. The meaning of the cherubim in the inner shrine must be that Jahwe is sitting on two of the wings, which the cherubim hold towards each other, while the other two are a kind of armleans on the throne.
From this arrangement comes Jahwe’s epitheton “Who is enthroned on the cherubim”. The Ark, probably a plain box, was the footstool. The later envision of the Ark, as it is known from the stories of the Israelites in the Wilderness and in popular form from the film “Raiders of the lost Ark” is a misunderstanding of this arrangement.
But the cherubim are found also in other connections in the temple. The walls were decorated with cherubim standing antithetically on each side of a stylised palm tree, a palmette. This is a very old religious motif originally from Mesopotamia, going back to the V millennium BC. The tree is the Tree of Life, planted on the Cosmic Mountain, the Mountain of the World, the mountain which is the foundation of the earth, the mountain from which Heaven and Earth were created, the mountain which holds back the Primeval Ocean, and from which the four paradise-rivers flow. In Mesopotamia the Tree of Life had connection with the king; the king waters it, it is at the same time the fertility god Tammuz and consequently a symbol of kingship. In the temple of Jerusalem the motif symbolises that the mountain where the Tree of Life stands, Mount Zion, is the Cosmic Mountain in the Jerusalemite mythology. The temple mount is the centre of the world.
Finally the chains of buds and calyxes are connected with the royalty. It is lotus chains, known from several connections in the Bronze- and Iron Ages in the Levant. It is an Egyptian motif, which spread to the Levant in the Late Bronze Age during the period of the Egyptian empire. In Egypt the lotus flower was from already the XVIII Dynasty (ca. 1550-1300 BC) a symbol of the Sun God Re‛, as well as of Horus, the sun, which was born every morning from the womb of the god of heaven Nut, and so also a symbol of the king, the sun god incarnate; behind the symbolism of the lotus flowers lies Egyptian cosmology with “The beautiful boy rising from the Primeval Sea on the Great Lotus, the Creator God". Lotus also symbolises life after death, resurrection and love, and is
37 connected with kingship and the king’s divinity. In this connection it is worth remembering that the columns at the entrance had lotus capitals (cf. 1. Kings 7, 19).
It is of course uncertain, how much of the Near Eastern mythology and iconographic programme was understood in Jerusalem in the Iron Age. But I feel confident that we have not a mere decoration, as we today often use religious iconography I all kinds of buildings. This was not the way of thinking in Antiquity; the arrangement was a conscious iconographic programme signalling the nature of the king as the son of God and also signalling life after death for the king like in Egypt.
Inside the temple building several kinds of temple utensil were placed: an altar for incense offerings, wash-basins, tables and lamps. Outside in the temenos, the holy enclosure of the forecourt, demarcated by a wall, more installations were set up: on each side of the entrance to the temple building, two free-standing bronze pillars with the names Jachin and Boaz (probably with the meaning “He stands” and “With strength”, playing a role in the royal cult, especially at accessions to the throne (cf. 2. Kings 11, 13), and having parallels in other temples from the Levant. Another customary piece of temple furniture was the Brazen Sea, called The Sea, a representation of the Primeval Sea, from which God had created the world; it was resting on twelve bulls, symbols of strength and fertility, which in groups of three were orientated to the four corners of the world, with a clear cosmic symbolism, here was the centre of the world. Finally there was an altar for burnt offerings, not mentioned, however, in 1. Kings 6-7; this was possibly because the altar was a remnant from an earlier cult on the site and then not mentioned in the later edited text on the building of the temple. The altar is mentioned in other texts from the Bible, see for instance 1. Kings 8, 22.
As mentioned above, the temple with its architecture and iconography lies in the general Western Semitic pattern for temple-building and –cult. It is obvious that the temple was the official sanctuary in a city-state or small territorial state, and as such lying in the ordinary Canaanite polytheistic religious pattern. This is corroborated by the information, we find other places on its history until its destruction 587 BC. 2. Kings 18, 4 describes the purging from the temple by king Hezekiah of a bronze serpent, Nehushtan, said to have been made by Moses himself; this brazen serpent has its foundation legend in Numbers 21, where Moses makes it as a kind of apotropaic
38 magic against poisonous snakes; it is obviously an idol in connection with a snake cult like in other places in the Levant and in Greece. In 1. Kings 15, 13 and 2. Kings 21, 7 and 23, 6 we are informed of an Asherah made of wood; this is a fertility goddess, connected with trees, she was the consort of El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon, and was represented by a wooden pole. 2. Kings 21, 5 mentions altars for offerings to the Canaanite fertility god Ba’al, and 2. Kings 16, 10 relates that the king in connection with a treaty with Assyria builds an altar for the Assyrian national God Asshur. Finally we are told 2. Kings 23, 4-14 of sun worship, of star worship, of worship of the Zodiac (originally a Mesopotamian concept), of Ba’al- and Asherah-worship, and of temple prostitution with both male and female prostitutes.
So it seems obvious that there is nothing uniquely Israelitic in the temple. It was a normal Western- Semitic/Canaanite temple among other temples in the Levant, as also the God worshipped there, Jahwe, was not different from other gods in Canaanite religion; and, as we have seen, other gods could also be tolerated and worshipped in the temple of Jerusalem. But still the very existence and the character of the temple in Jerusalem important for the history of religion and for the history of the region in a later period, e.g. the tri-partition of the house developed in Jerusalem became a model for many other religious houses later in Europe, all the way to medieval churches in Denmark with its tri-partition into porch, nave and chancel.
Many mythological conceptions were in the course of time attached to the temple. We have seen how Jerusalem was considered unconquerable because of it, but also the Paradise with the Tree of Life, cherubim and the four paradise-rivers was thought to be here.
But all to no avail. Assyria had in the course of the centuries subjugated the whole Near East, latest Egypt in 671 BC; but in the second half of the 7. century BC Assyria was weakened, and a coalition consisting of Babylonia (Chaldea), and Elam succeeded in destroying Nineveh in 612 BC and finally making and end to the Assyrian empire in 605. The Neo-Babylonian kingdom now became the successor state to the vast empire, and the king became master of Syria and Palestine including Judah. In the first years it did not entail great changes the first years, but in connection with a rebellion 598 BC, King Nebuchadnezar took Jerusalem and put a vassal king, although still from the Davidic house, on the throne. This did not bring a lasting peace, and after another rebellion in 587 Nebukadnezar laid siege to Jerusalem, took it and destroyed the city and its temple. A large part
39 of the inhabitants were exiled in Babylonia, including the rebellious king, priest and artisans (especially lock-smiths, capable of manufacture weapons); some of them already in 598, some in 587, and finally some in 582 after a last rebellion; The Book of Jeremiah enumerates 4600 persons, not a great number in itself, but still comparable to for example the Sovjet deportations from Poland in 1939, when 200.000 person were deported to Siberia, like in Judah the men with key functions.
The temple was destroyed, and its treasures taken to Babylon as booty.
40 4
Come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem8
Jerusalem from the Babylonian conquest to Herod Jerusalem was utterly destroyed in the year 587 BC. Furthermore the city was no longer a capital of a state, not even of a vassal state; the administration had been moved to Mizpah, the present Tell el- Nasbe north of Jerusalem, which was now seat of the governor of a province in the Babylonian empire. A new rebellion in 582 BC ended in disaster, and more people were deported; a number of people fled to Egypt, forcing the prophet Jeremiah to join them and founding the Egyptian Diaspora. Judah was not deserted, but large parts of the country were devastated, and life was poor. The country was probably still supplier of raw materials to Mesopotamia, no longer now to Assyria but to Babylonia.
Fig. 8 Jerusalem in the Persian Period and Early Hellenistic Period
In Jerusalem itself things had gone terribly wrong, the city shrank to south-eastern hill, where the original Iron Age Jerusalem had been situated, and now only on the top of the hill and without walls, while the slopes were filled with debris from the devastation. And the elite from the
8 Nehemiah 2, 17.
41 population, the king, his court, the priests, the warrior and the important artisans had been deported. Still life went on, and apparently there was a lively intercourse between the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the deportees in Babylonia, as may be seen from the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
In Babylonia the exiles from Judah lived a tolerable life. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, had his own house and his personal freedom. The exiles were not prisoners but deportees, and they were like they had been before the Babylonian king’s subject, only now living in another place; they could till the land, make handicrafts and on the whole become prosperous citizens. Most of them also preferred to stay in Babylonia, when they after 538 BC had the chance to return to Judah.
But there was a riddle to the deportees: How it could at all come about that Jerusalem and its temple had been destroyed. Jerusalem was impregnable, so they had believed since 701 BC, and this theological problem had to be solved, if they should live on. The prophet Ezekiel, who was born in Jerusalem and had seen the temple before its destruction, but was exiled in 598, wrote in his book, how he, in a vision, had seen the Lord leave his temple, carried by cherubim, and go to the Mountain of Olives east of Jerusalem, and then from there abandon the city. Now, when God had abandoned his temple, it was possible for the unclean foreigners to conquer and destroy the city. Jerusalem was according to the prophet destroyed as punishment for all the evil deeds committed by the kings and their people, like Samaria had been destroyed 722 BC as punishment for the sins of the Israelite kings and their people. But Ezekiel also had a vision where he saw how God himself would create a new Jerusalem with a new temple. We shall return to this.
Another and epoch-making theological innovation was the idea monotheism, the idea of only one God. Earlier the usual religious belief was monolatry, the cult of one god as the god of the nation, while other nations’ gods were also acknowledged. Israel and Judah should be faithful to Jahwe, but Jahwe was a god among other gods in the pantheon of the supreme god. Judah and Israel had Jahwe, Egypt had Amon-Re‛, Assyria had Asshur, Babylonia had Marduk, and closer to Judah Aram Damascus had Ba’al-Hadad, Ammon had Milkom, and Moab had Kemosh. This distribution of gods happened at the dawn of history in a pantheon, at the court of El Eljon, the king of the gods: “When the Most High parcelled out the nations, when he dispersed all mankind, he laid down the boundaries of every people
42 according to the number of the sons of God; but the Lord’s (Jahwe’s) share was his own people, Jacob his allotted portion” (Deuteronomy 32, 8-9).
Jahwe had chosen his people, and not the other way round: “Listen Israelites, to these words that the Lord addresses to you, to the whole nation which he brought up from Egypt: For you alone have I cared among all the nations of the world; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3, 1-2).
“..for you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God chose you out of all nations on earth to be his special possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other nation that the Lord cared for you and chose you, for you were the smallest of all nations; it was because the Lord loved you and stood by his oath to your forefathers, that he brought you out with his strong hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (Deut 7, 6-8).
Now, when monotheism, the idea that all other gods than Jahwe were but false gods, only idols made by man crystallised, and Jahwe had been identified with the head of the Canaanite pantheon. El Elyon, God the Most High, Jahwe became creator god and only god. And then God of course had power over all the other (false) gods; and all the kings of other people, even the kings of Assyria and Babylonia and Egypt, were but tools in God’s hand. This is most clearly seen by the prophet, which we usually call Deuteroisaiah, who wrote Isaiah 40-55: “Before me there was no god fashioned nor ever shall be after me. I am the Lord, I myself, And no one but I can deliver. I myself have made it known in full, and declared it, I and no alien god amongst you, And you are my witnesses, says the Lord,
43 I am God; from this very day I am He.” (Isaiah 43, 10b-13a).
And “Thus says the Lord, Israel’s King, the Lord of Hosts, his ransomer: I am the first and I am the last, And there is no God but me.” (Isaiah 44, 6).
And “Those who make idols are less than nothing; all their cherished images profit nobody; their worshippers are blind, sheer ignorance makes fools of them. If a man makes a god or casts an image, His labour is wasted. Why! Its votaries show their folly; The craftsmen too are men.” (Isaiah 44, 9-11).
And “Thus says the Lord, the creator of the heavens, he who is God, who made the earth and fashioned it and himself fixed it fast, who created it no empty void, but made it for a place to dwell in: I am the Lord, there is no other.” (Isaiah 45, 18).
And finally: “Look to me and be saved, you peoples from all corners of the earth; for I am God, there is no other. By my life I have sworn, I have given a promise of victory,
44 a promise that will not be broken, that to me every knee shall bend and by me every tongue shall wear. In the Lord alone, men shall say, are victory and might; and all who defy him shall stand ashamed in his presence….” (Isaiah 45, 22-24).
And just as God had used the Babylonian king to punish Jerusalem, he will use the Persian king Cyrus to set the people free that it may return home: “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus his anointed, Cyrus whom he has taken by the hand to subdue nations before him and undo the might of kings; before whom gates shall be opened and no doors be shut: I will go before you and level the swelling hills; I will break down gates of bronze and hack through iron bars.” (Isaiah 45, 1-2).
And “I alone, I made the earth and created man upon it; I, with my own hands, stretched out the heavens and caused all their hosts to shine. I alone have roused this man in righteousness, and will smooth his path before him; he shall rebuild my city and let my exiles go free – not for a price nor for a bribe, says the Lord of Hosts.” (Isaiah 45, 12-13).
45
The longing for Jerusalem is most beautifully expressed in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willow-trees we hung our harps, for there those who carried us off demanded music and singing, and our captors called on us to be merry: `Sing us one of the songs of Zion.´ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither away; let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.” (Psalm 137, 1-6).
How great the wish to return home was with at least part of the exiles, may be seen in the myth of the exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea, while Pharaoh’s army perished in the water; the exiles were sure that as God had led the Israelites out of Egypt, he would also lead the exiles in Babylonia home again. I am convinced, even if it cannot be proved, that the whole story of the sojourn in Egypt and the liberation from there with the ten plagues and the final liberation and exodus was created in Babylonia, and created by an elite from a burning desire to be liberated from, what they then saw as a new exile, and with a hope of a new liberation from slavery. “Thus says the Lord your ransomer, the Holy One of Israel: For your sakes I have sent to Babylon; I will lay the Chaldaeans prostrate as they flee, and their cry of triumph will turn into groaning. I am the Lord, your Holy One, your creator, Israel, and your King.
46 Thus says the Lord who opened a way in the sea and a path through mighty waters, who drew on chariot and horse to their destruction, a whole army, men of valour; there they lay, never to rise again; they were crushed, snuffed out like a wick.” (Isaiah 43, 14-17).
And finally the exiles out of disparate traditions created, probably in close connection with the descendants of the exiles from the destruction of Israel/ the Northern Kingdom in 732 and 722 BC who lived in Northern Mesopotamia, and with those who were still living in Judah, the great history of a United Kingdom under David and Solomon with its capital Jerusalem, and furthermore this history was set in connection with the legends of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the traditions of the Sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus. The whole story formed an epic, beginning with Abraham’s setting out from Ur in southern Mesopotamia, the Patriarchs’, Abraham’s, Isaac’s and Jacob’s stay in Canaan as nomads, Jacob’s descent to Egypt, the Sojourn of the Israelites there, the Exodus, the Wanderings in the Wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, the period of the Judges, the Davidic-Solomonic kingdom and finally the period of the Kings with two kingdoms down to their fall in 722 and 587 BC. This history was instrumental in the creation of Jerusalem’s unique position as God’s chosen city and abode.
Of course it is impossible to decide how much of these traditions were collected or formed in the latest period in Judah before the exile when refugees from Israel had brought the northern traditions, for example tradition about Jacob, to Jerusalem, or how much came from the period of the Exile, and how much originated from the period after the exile, when there were still large numbers of exiles left in Mesopotamia but now also in Egypt, all with connections in Jerusalem. It is, however, beyond doubt, that the centuries from the fall of Israel in 722 until ca 330 BC when Hellenism began, have been the formative years in the Jewish tradition-writing, and also for the understanding of Jerusalem as a unique city, God’s chosen abode.
The combination of the idea of a chosen people with monotheism and the creation of this great history of Israel, where the underlying idea is that God himself had created the history of the Jewish
47 people, as they should now be called, was a great strength for the people and made it possible for the people to survive the exile in Mesopotamia, as well as in the later Diaspora from the Hellenistic period until this day. On the other hand it created a notion of being something special, something apart from all other people, a notion which should later turn out to have fateful consequences.
From the period of the exile, more accurately from 573 BC originates a text, Ezekiel’s vision of the new Jerusalem and its new temple, a text which in the long run had a great importance for Jerusalem. The frame for the text is the vision of Ezekiel, in which he saw Jahwe leave his temple and Jerusalem leaving it to be destroyed (Ezekiel 10, 8-22). Later (chapters 40-42) the prophet in a vision is brought by God from his home in Babylon to the new temple, which is described in every detail. As mentioned Ezekiel was a priest, and his vision is therefore influenced by the pre-exilic temple, which he had seen; and also he must have known the documents describing the temple (1. Kings 6-7).
It is remarkable that with time the idea of three rooms in the temple instead of 2 rooms and a wooden cube is has become natural. The real new in the design is the position of the altar for burnt offerings: it is now placed in centre of the whole temple complex and should in Ezekiel’s mind be the most important feature in the new eschatological place of worship, God himself will build (cf. laws of sacrifice Ezekiel 46, 1-15). Here on the altar, which in its shape is inspired by the Mesopotamian Ziggurats (temple towers), man can communicate with God. Ezekiel also sees God take up his abode in the new temple (chapters 43, 1-12). At the same time it is clear that Zion, now name for the temple mount only, is the Mountain of the World where heaven and earth meet (chapters 20, 40), and in chapter 47 where a spring issues from under the temple, we see that Paradise lies on Zion, and the spring is the River of Paradise. Finally it is important that the future king will not have the same importance as he pre-exilic kings; they were the masters and high priests of the temple, but here they are shoved aside and will not be allowed to bring sacrifices, only priest are allowed to enter the temple (chapters 46, 1-13).
48
Fig. 9 Ezekiel’s temple vision. A Temenos wall; B Gates; C Pavement; D,G,H,I,L,N Rooms; E Inner court; F Temple house; J Wall between outer and inner court; K Altar; O Steps.
This temple was never built, but Ezekiel’s vision had a great importance for the later ideas about Jerusalem and its temple as the centre of the world. An echo of the vision is found in the so-called Temple Scroll from Qumran, where the idea of protecting the holiness of God is prevalent.
The Babylonian empire lasted less than a hundred years, and a new empire, the Persian empire, succeeded to have power over the near East. The Persian king Cyrus, who ascended the throne 550 BC, conquered first Media, next Lydia and finally Babylon 538 BC, and became king of the whole Babylonian empire. The new empire was organised in 20 provinces, so-called satrapies, with a satrap or vice king at its head. Palestine became part of the V satrapy, Eber-Nari, which was subdivided in provinces, each with a governor. Jerusalem became capital of the province Jehud, from where we know the names of three of the governors, Zerubbabel from ca 520 BC, Nehemiah sometime in the 5. Century BC and Ezekiah sometime in the 4. Century BC.
49 The exiles were allowed to return. It was, however, but a small number, who did so, most of the exiles preferred to stay and created the Babylonian Diaspora. The few, who returned, cooperated with the people who had stayed in Judah and Jerusalem. One of them, the governor Zerubbabel from the Davidic lineage, was allowed to rebuild the temple by king Darius (521-485 BC). He was instigated by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. The temple was restored in the years 520-15 BC. Probably Zerubbabel tried to recreate the temple of Solomon, anyway it seems that the old foundations were reused. We do not know its appearance; but there is reason to assume that the traditions about the Tabernacle in Exodus 25-27, written in the 5. – 3. centuries BC, form en echo of the temple.
One new piece of temple furniture should be mentioned, the large 7-armed Menora (Exodus 25, 31- 40), actually a stylised Tree of Life, corresponding to the palmettes in the temple of Solomon; it stood in the temple until its final destruction 70 AD, and this lamp played a large role in the temple cult in the New Testament period.
The rebuilding of the temple made Jerusalem into a primarily religious city, a kind of temple state. There was no king, and the priests were the only men allowed to officiate in the temple which gave them also great secular power. And the belief in Jahwe, or the Lord, which now became "The Name” of God, as the only true God and Creator God, made Jerusalem the centre of the world and the really holy city of the world, at least for the Jews, first and foremost the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the province Jehud, but also for the many in the Diaspora in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Several mythological notions became attached to the temple, but it is not possible precisely to determine when the various elements arose. However, there must have been continuity from the temple before the exile, Jerusalem was at no time a void. And the memory of myths and ideas, connected with the temple before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, were carried across the exile, as I mentioned with regard to the great epic of history. A proof of continuity has been found in Jerusalem in excavations. At the slope of the Hinnom valley a number of burial caves were found from the Iron Age, some of them with bench-burials, enabling them to receive more than one burial, the old skeleton being removed when a new burial was necessary. In one of these caves there was a repository with several hundred burial gifts from burials from the 8. and the 7. centuries BC.
50 The most important finds were two silver charms, small capsules each containing an enrolled silver leaf with an inscription. They say: 1 “….Jahwe bless you and keep you. Jahwe let his face shine….” 2 “ Jahwe bless you and keep you, Jahwe let his face shine (upon) and give you peace….” It is not difficult to recognise the so-called Aronitic blessing from Numeri 6, 24-26, used even today every Sunday in churches from the altar. This text is the oldest Bible fragment existing, and it points to a tradition which reaches across the exile. But of course as mentioned before it will usually turn out to be impossible to judge what is pre-exilic and what is later.
The temple lay on the Mountain of the World, where heaven and earth meet, eben shetiyyah – the foundation stone, on which the world rests, from which heaven and earth were created, and at the same time the “stopper” on the Primeval Sea, always threatening to overwhelm the world like in the Flood. It was what the Greek called Omphalos – the navel of the world. Paradise was there, as may be seen from the river of Paradise, described in Ezekiel 47, or it may be seen from the Menorah, a representation of the Tree of Life. Because it was the site of Paradise, Adam was buried under the rock. Because the place was the centre of the world, the judgment on the last day shall of course take place there; this made it popular to be buried or at least have the bones buried on the slope of the Mount of Olives opposite the temple or in the Kedron Valley. Also Abraham became attached to the temple, In Genesis 14 he is visiting Melchizedek, the mythical king of Jerusalem or Salem, who reigned before David captured the city. He brought Abraham food and wine and blessed him: “Blessed be Abram by God the Most High, creator of heaven and earth. And blessed be God the Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your power.” (Genesis 14, 19-20).
And finally the rock, the highest place on the temple mount, today below the Dome of the Rock, became identified with Mount Moriah: “Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David, on the site which David had prepared on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite”. This is a conflation of 2. Samuel 24 with Genesis 22. We have two different foundation legends for the temple in Jerusalem. The
51 Samuel legend anchors the temple with the founder of the city. But in post-exilic theology Genesis 22 had a wider meaning. It was the time, when Abraham, the father of Jewish faith and also ancestor of all Jews was told to sacrifice his son Isaac when God wishes to put him to the test. When he showed his obedience, he was spared this ordeal because God gave him a ram to sacrifice as Isaac’s substitute. In identifying the temple Mount with Mount Moriah the story of Abraham and Isaac becomes the true foundation legend for the alter of burnt offerings in Jerusalem. Abraham the ancestor of the Jews himself had built it. This anchored the temple of Jerusalem at the very roots of the Jewish faith. And this legend was to attain an enormous importance more than a thousand years later, when the Muslim armies led by the caliph Omar had conquered Jerusalem 638 AD.
Nehemiah, one of the few persons, we know by name from the period, was governor in the 5. century BC. He rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem. The book of Nehemiah has a description of Jerusalem when he came from Babylon there, which shows that the whole eastern slope of Ophel was in ruins: “Then I set out by night, taking a few men with me; but I told no one, what my God was prompting me to do for Jerusalem. I had no beast with me except the one on which I myself rode. I went out by night through the Valley Gate towards the Dragon Spring and the Dung Gate, and I inspected the places where the walls of Jerusalem had been broken down and her gates burnt. Then I passed the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but there was no room for me to ride through” (Nehemiah 2,11-15).
This was confirmed by Kenyon in her excavations, which demonstrated that the whole eastern slope was in ruins, and that any attempt of rebuilding this part of the city was abandoned, the new walls were build on the crest of the hill, where the so-called Tower of Nehemiah was proved to be from the 5. century BC and so probably from Nehemiah’s time. Jerusalem was thus reduced to its smallest size before David (except for the temple). We know very little of the city and its life in this period, the city must, however, have had some independence, as the governors had the right to issue coins with the inscription Jehud, the name of the province. Several types of these coins have been found.
The most interesting coin shows, on the reverse, the only known image of Jahwe from the period; the picture has a syncretistic nature: God sits on a throne with winged wheels, reminiscent of Ezekiel’s vision of God on his throne (Ezekiel 1, 4-28), he has an eagle on his arm, normally an
52 attribute of Zeus, and above there is an inscription Jehud; on the avers the coin shows a head with a Corinthian helm. The coin dates to the middle of the 4. Century BC, possible the coin was issued by a Persian governor or even satrap. The coin show the cultural environment shortly before Alexander’s conquests, in a period where a growing Hellenistic influence is obvious. Other coins of this type, but without an image of God, bear the name Ezekiah (yhzqyh), identified with a man who was both priest and governor in the period towards Alexander’s conquest.
Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire was an epoch-making event in the history of the Middle East. Politically the empire was split up shortly after his death 323 BC into two: the Seleucid kingdom, named after Seleukos, one of Alexander’s generals; it consisted of Mesopotamia, Syria, parts of Asia Minor and in the beginning Macedonia; the other part was the Ptolemaic kingdom, named after Ptolemaios, another of Alexander’s generals; it comprised Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine. But culturally the conquest was the beginning of one of the most thorough and enduring cultural epochs in western history, Hellenism, which characterised the Middle East for more than a millennium, from Alexander’s conquest until ca. 750 when the Ummayyad dynasty in Damascus was superseded by the Abbassids who built a new capital for the caliphate, Bagdad. In this period the Oriental world became Hellenized; it was transformed under the influence of Greek culture, both in its material culture, as well as literary and religiously. Later, during and after the Principate, the Roman empire under Augustus and his successors, the Middle East was also transformed by Roman culture, in itself a extension and intensifying of the Hellenistic culture developed in the eastern part of the Roman empire. The degree of Hellenization of course varied from place to place. In the Levant the Hellenization was most intense in North Syria, where already Alexander’s successor began to build Hellenistic cities, later continued by Seleucus, who built the four great cities Antioch, Laodicea, Seleucia and Apamea, together called Tetrapolis. They constituted the political and economic centre of gravity in the Seleucid kingdom, and and also later in the whole Levant until the Arab conquest in 638 AD. Further to the east and to the south in the Levant the Hellenistic culture was more of a veneer on a society, scarcely changed in reality.
Palestine, both east and west of Jordan came under Egyptian, Ptolemaic control, but we do not know much about the country in the following century. The country was governed by a strategos, but the Ptolemaic kings seem to have real interest in the coastal area only.
53 There was constant strife between the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid kingdoms, and when the Seleucid king Antiochus III the Great (223-187 BC) won a battle at Panaion (today Banias) in 198 BC against Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205-180 BC), Palestine became a province in the Seleucid kingdom. In contrast to the Ptolemies, the Seleucid kings, especially Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 BC), had a great interest in Palestine and endeavoured to Hellenize it in cooperation with the leading families in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem his enforced Hellenization culminated in 168 BC, when an altar for the Olympic Zeus was set up on the altar for burnt offerings in the temple, and the Jewish cult was suppressed (1. Maccabees 1, 41-64). This triggered the Maccabean revolt, which by and large stopped the Hellenization, even if the ruling class more or less felt themselves to be a Hellenistic dynasty, and large parts of the population anyway were more or less under Hellenistic influence.
The revolt was lead by a priestly family, the Maccabees, named after Judas Maccabaeus, son of the priest Mattathias. He reacted against the profanation of the temple with a rebellion, which after his death 166 BC was continued by Judas Maccabaeus (166-61 BC), and after him the brothers Jonathan (161-42 BC) and Simon (142-35). After a series of victories the Maccabees succeeded in 164 BC to liberate Jerusalem from Syrian rule, except for the fortress Acra, a fortress north of the temple platform built by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, from which the Syrian governor could control the temple. The temple was re-sanctified in December that year, and since then Hanukka is celebrated in memory of this occasion. A provisional peace was made in 163 BC, the Syrian king, however, kept control of Acra. But Jonathan then turned to Rome and Sparta and entered into a treaty with them, a fateful decision because it gave the Romans excuse to enter the power game. After renewed wars the Seleucids finally gave up Acra in 142 BC under Roman pressure, and the Seleucids recognized Simon, after the murder of Jonathan, as “high priest, commander and prince”. In reality the Maccabees now ruled an independent kingdom, for the time being a vassal kingdom; the royal lineage was named the Hasmonaeans after Mattathias’ grandfather Hasmon.
The following kings John Hyrkan (135-105 BC), Aristobul (105-03 BC), who as the first claimed the title of king, and particularly Alexander Jannaeus (103-76 BC) extended the power of the Hasmonaeans considerably and created a great kingdom, with the greatest culmination of the power and influence of Jerusalem so far. A lasting aim in the policies of the Hasmonaeans was the geographical extension of territory, and at the same time they tried to Hellenize the country and
54 coerce the inhabitants into Judaism, for example John Hyrkan forced the Idumaeans to become circumcised and keep the Jewish laws9.
The power of the Hasmonaeans was dissipated because of strife among the royal family, and the Roman general Pompey conquered Syria and Palestine 63 BC, Shortly after this Herod became king.
Fig. 10 Hasmonaean Jerusalem
The Hasmonaean Jerusalem lay mainly on the Eastern Hill but spilled over to the Western Hill south of David Street, where the Upper City became situated; the extent and dating of this part of the city is, however, uncertain. Even if there had been a considerable built-up area here in the later part of the time before the destruction of Jerusalem, in the late period of the kings, especially form the time of Hezekiah ca. 700 BC, as may be seen from excavations in the Citadel and from Avigad’s excavations in the Jewish Quarter, no building from Iron Age II C (the post-exilic, Persian period) has been found, not even in the Citadel. This is of course, because Jerusalem was poor and limited to the Eastern Hill at the beginning of the post-exilic period. Later also building began on
9 Idumaea was the southernmost part of Palestine, south of Bet Zur, where immigrants from Edom in the years after the Babylonian invasion in 587 BC had settled. Idumaea attained a considerable position as a trading nation in the years towards the new millennium.
55 the Western Hill, but it is, as said above, uncertain what the extent of the built-up area was. How far to the north the city stretched, is also uncertain, but everything makes it probable that the temple enclosure, and consequently the city, was limited by the valley and moat mentioned above, under the present Haram from the Kedron Valley to the Tyropoion Valley (see chapter 1), and there is no indication that Zerubbabel, when he rebuilt the temple, extended the temple enclosure to the north. The area north of Haram, Bezetha was not built up, apart from Akra/Antonia and Probatica (Pool of Bethesda), before Herod Agrippa built the “Third Wall” in 40-44 AD.
But apart from the archaeological evidence for the extent of Jerusalem, we have at least written evidence of new buildings from the Hellenistic period in Jerusalem. Obviously there was an effort to make Jerusalem into a polis (i.e. a city governed with a Greek-Hellenistic constitution) by the high priests Jason and Menelaos supported by the Syrian kings, who still after the Maccabean revolt had the formal suzerainty. The high priest Jason had in 175 BC obtained permission to build a gymnasion, an institution for athletics, after Greek custom in the nude, an abomination for Jews (2. Maccabees 4,9). A boule, city hall, a typical Hellenistic institution, is mentioned in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, who among other writings wrote the ”Jewish Antiquities”, a history from the creation to his own time shortly after 70 AD, and the “Jewish War”, a history of the Jewish war against Rome 66-73 AD, where he himself was a general. Also Baris built by John Hyrkan must be mentioned, it was probably situated where Antiochus IV Epiphanes had built Akra in 168 BC. And finally a Hasmonaean palace mentioned in the Antiquities must be mentioned, it was probably situated in the Upper City and was connected with the temple across the Tyropoion Valley with a bridge. None of these buildings have survived, and even the ruins have disappeared except for a few loose fragments, for example column bases. Archaeological excavations have uncovered very little from the period, only disparate elements. The typical Hellenistic town planning, the Hippodamic town with straight streets crossing each other, made by the architect Hippodamos from Milet was not yet used in Jerusalem.
The temple itself was already before 200 BC surrounded by two forecourts. But the architecture of the temple itself was not altered.
Some Hellenization may be seen in the many Hellenistic tombs, found in or around Jerusalem, especially in the Kedron Valley, where we today can see Zechariah’s Tomb with its name later
56 taken from the prophet Zechariah, and Absalom’s Tomb, or Absalom Yad (monument), the name of which identifies it with a pillar set up by Absalom, King David’s son, when he rebelled and took power in Jerusalem (2. Samuel 18, 18).
The Hellenistic period saw a strong growth of the Diaspora, the Jewish population outside Palestine. There was already from 735, 722, 598 and 587 BC a Jewish population in Mesopotamia and after 582 BC also in Egypt. These groups had of course multiplied and spread in the Persian period with the openness and tolerance in this empire, and several times Jews were also forcibly moved, for instance to the lands at the Caspian Sea, when a king wished to develop a part of his realm. But now, with the wealth and openness, which came with the Hellenism and the Roman Empire, there were possibilities for emigration and for Jewish communities everywhere. We find traces of Jewish mercenaries at Elephantine already in the Persian Period, they even had a temple there; and we hear of Jews far to the east in Adiabene in the eastern part of present day Iran, where the royal family became proselytes; one of them, queen Helena, was buried in Jerusalem.
Antiochus moved 2000 families from Mesopotamia to Phrygia and Lydia. And if you look at Paul’s missionary travels and letters, you realise the extent of the Jewish Diaspora in Asian Minor and in Greece. In the Hellenistic-Roman period there was a very great Jewish population in Egypt, according to the Jewish author Philon in Alexandria alone one million. And Jews were living in Syria, in Phoenicia, in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Rome, in Spain, in Gallia, in Libya and so forth, as far away as Adiabene, as we have seen. This had an immense importance for Jerusalem: all over the world there were groups of people, for whom the centre of the world was Jerusalem, because the only and true God’s temple was situated there. They paid taxes to the temple, and they wished to have their bones buried there when they died.
57 5
….and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another…10
Jerusalem from Herod to Constantine Towards the end of the millennium BC Rome became more and more involved in the astern Mediterranean and finally took the power over both the Seleucid and the Ptolemaic kingdoms. Palestine was conquered by Pompey 63 BC and came under Roman suzerainty, even if the country in practice still was governed by the Hasmonaeans. But the Roman suzerainty paved the way for Herod.
King Herod (37 BC – 4 BC), a Judaean but by birth an Idumaean, tried his whole reign to Hellenize Jewish society. “So while he laboured to raise Judaea to the rank of one of the greatest client- kingdoms of Rome, by secularizing it as far as possible and giving it a definitely Hellenistic structure, on another side his policy bore a strong Jewish imprint. It was Herod’s fate to be a great man déraciné, who lavished his boundless energies on the contradictory tasks of hellenizing the Jewish State and of enhancing the political prestige of Judaism”11 He was the most important of all the client kings in the Augustan empire, and to all intents an purposes the lynch pin in the Roman hold on the eastern Roman provinces, where Rome was in competition with the Parthian kingdom to the east. To understand Herod’s importance in the Roman empire one should remember that he rose to power, when the whole empire was in turmoil after the civil wars: first between Caesar and Pompey, where Caesar was victorious; then after the murder on Caesar 44 BC between the murderers Cassius and Brutus on the one side and the triumvirs Octavian, Antony and Lepidus on the other side, where the triumvirs were victorious; and finally between Octavian and Antony, where in the end Octavian was victorious and took power as Emperor Augustus (31/29 BC – 14 AD). All the time Herod managed to be on the winning side. At the same time as these civil wars raged, Rome was in continuous war with the Parthian kingdom, Rome’s neighbour to the east, which invaded Syria and Palestine 40 BC, so Rome needed a strong ally and client in the Levant. Decisive events in Herod’s career were his meetings with Antony in Bithynia in 41 BC and later with Octavian on Rhodes in 30 BC.
10 Luke 19, 44. 11 A. Momigliani, `Herod and Judaea´, in CAH X p. 322.
58
Herod was a son’s son of Antipater, Idumaean strategos (generalissimo) under the Hasmonaean king Alexander Jannaeus (104-76 BC). Antipater’s son, also with the name Antipater, who was created Roman citizen by Caesar in 47 BC, wielded even more power than his father under Alexander’s successor Hyrkan II (63-40 BC), and he appointed Herod governor of Galilee. In 40 BC, when the Parthian crises was at its culmination, Herod got a ship from Cleopatra, went to Rome and was there unanimously made king of Judea by the Senate, apparently on orders from Antony and Octavian; at least Herod left the Senate arm in arm with both of them. Hyrkan, however, was still alive, and his nephew Antigonous (40-37) governed the country, appointed king by the Parthian king. This shows that Herod as king was a pawn in Rome’s political game. Antony and Octavian placed some Roman legions at Herod’s disposal, and by their help he conquered his kingdom the following years (40-37 BC) and could after a siege of Jerusalem enter the city 37 BC, where his first act was to build the fortress Antonia (named after his benefactor Antony); it was placed on the spot, where formerly Acra built by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Baris built by John Hyrkan had stood, and completely dominated the temple enclosure. After this Herod became king of a country, greater than Solomon’s mythical kingdom or Alexander Jannaeus’.
The key to his success was his Roman citizenship, inherited from his father, and his generous friendship with Augustus, while for his part Augustus gave him a free hand in pursuing his power in Syria-Palestine. It is remarkable, that Rome gave him a free hand also over the economy, and did not claim taxes from Herod, apparently Augustus considered his kingdom his private property, which explain his nearly unlimited resources for his building programme. His only obligation towards Augustus was to furnish Rome with auxiliary soldiers on demand.
As mentioned Herod was Idumaean by birth, and because his father was a Jewish proselyte, he was also a Jew. But to my mind, his true religious conviction, if he had any, was a syncretistic agnosticism. This may be seen from his attitudes: where necessary and possible, he built temples for Rome and Augustus, an abomination to the Jews; he also gave large donations to temples elsewhere, and he began his career as a king to by giving offerings to Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome, when he had been appointed king. On the other hand, he gave the Jews a magnificent temple in Jerusalem by restoring and embellishing the temple of Zerubbabel. But in so doing, he altered the
59 whole concept of the temple, from a temple dedicated solely to Adonai Elohim, the Lord God, into a syncretistic monument, as we shall see.
We know quite a lot about Herod’s building activities from texts. Outside Palestine we find building activities twenty-five different places. In Phoenicia and Syria for example; in Damascus where his theatre has recently been found under the Danish Institute there; in Tyre; Byblus; Berytus; Tripoli; Laodicea and Antioch. In Asia Minor and Greece there are building activities in Lycia; Ionia; Pergamum; Rhodes; Cos; Chios; Samos; Delos; and even in Athens where he gave donations to the Acropolis among other places.
In Palestine, he built in forty places. He founded whole cities, like Caesarea; Sebaste; Antipatris and Phasaelis; and he built the famous fortress-palaces of Masada; Machaerus and Herodium; as well as other palaces like Jericho; Alexandreion; Ascalon; Hyrcania; Betharamphta; Sepphoris and Banyas. He built temples to Roma and Augustus in Caesarea; Sebaste and Banyas;, to Ba’al Shamem, the Canaanite God of Heaven, in Si’a near Canatha; and he built other religious memorials in Hebron to the Patriarchs and in Mamre to Abraham. He built theatres, amphitheatres, hippodromes, aqueducts, baths, pools and gardens, fortresses and fortifications, suqs, streets and colonnades.
In Jerusalem itself Herod carried out an enormous building program throughout his reign. Already in 37 BC when he captured Jerusalem, he built the fortress Antonia on the site of the Hasmonaean fortress Baris at the northeast corner of the temple mount, probably to control activities in the temple enclosure and secure the city, if any rebellion against his Hellenizing policy should arise. And in the course of the next 30 years he changed the character of Jerusalem and altered it into a Hellenistic metropolis. He rebuilt the Hasmonaean palace, and later he built a great palace in the Upper City at its western wall, the podium of which was excavated in the Armenian Garden south from the present police station, close to the towers Phasael, Mariamme and Hippicus, of which Phasael is still to be seen at the Jaffa Gate. For his family he built a tomb north of the present Damascus Gate, while his own tomb was meant to be at Herodium; and finally he built several Hellenistic-Roman buildings: a theatre, an amphitheatre and a hippodrome.
60
Fig. 11 Jerusalem in the time from Herod to Herod Agrippa
61 Herod rebuilt Jerusalem according to the Hippodamian city plan with streets running east-west and north-south, the main street ran from the so-called Wilson’s Arch on the western wall of the present Haram to the Citadel, where he built his palace; another notable street ran from the north-western corner of the temple enclosure along the temple terrace and all the way down to Siloam. Part of this grid is still discernible in present Jerusalem, although the present main grid of the city is from the time of Aelia Capitolina after the destruction of Jerusalem 70 AD and Hadrian’s rebuilding of the city as a Roman city (see below). Herod rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, and he probably incorporated the quarter lying north of David Street, east of Khan el-Zeit and Suq el-Attarin, thus pushing Jerusalem towards the quarries where the execution hill, Golgotha, was situated. Some historians claim that he built a wall from Mount Zion across the Tyropoion valley to Birkat Hamra south of Siloam, thus enclosing the valley; but this is uncertain, Kenyon’s excavations have found no finds coming from earlier than the Byzantine Period in the enclosed area.
But most important and most enduring Herod gave Jerusalem a water system large enough to support a very large population. Before his time Jerusalem had mostly been dependent on the water from the Gihon spring in the Kedron valley with Hezekiah’s tunnel leading the water to Siloam. Herod built many reservoirs or pools with large catchment-areas: in the north Probaticon (the Sheep Pool or Bethesda), the Israel Pool and Strouthion Pool; to the east Birkat Sitte Miryam, to the west Mamillah Pool and Hezekiah’s Pool, and to the south he repaired Hezekiah’s tunnel and built the Siloam Pool and Birkat Hamra. On top of it he built very large reservoirs south of Betlehem, the so- called Solomon’s Pools, and built aqueducts from there to Jerusalem. In this way he increased the water supply in Jerusalem so that the city could accommodate ca. 75.000 inhabitants. These water works were in use at least until ca. 1600 AD.
All these building activities were meant to enhance his reputation as the most important client king in Augustus’ empire, indeed the greatest ruler of the east, and maybe because of this status his activities were confined to the eastern part of the empire: Herod did not wish to annoy Augustus by venturing to the western part of the Roman Empire. It is suggestive that he furnished the spina of the hippodrome in Caesarea, his showpiece, with an obelisk. This was the symbol of divine royal power in Egypt, and was taken over later by the Roman emperors as a symbol of their deification while still living. It would be hard to find a more cunning, but as the same time a more
62 megalomaniac, piece of political propaganda from a client king than this, and at the same time it was undoubtedly a great luck, that Augustus was unlike to come to Caesarea ever.
Fig. 12 (Re)construction of Herod's temple
But, in a way as a paradox, the crown of Herod's Hellenization program was the restoration and embellishment of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. This temple was, according to the Bible, originally built by Solomon, the legendary king who had ruled a vast empire, equal to the great
63 empires Egypt and Babylonia, with Jerusalem as its capital. After Nebukadnezar had destroyed it 587 BC, it was rebuilt by Zerubbabel, possibly a scion of David, the founder of Israel and the first king of Jerusalem, in the years 520-15 BC when Jerusalem was a provincial capital in the Persian empire. And now Jerusalem was capital in the strongest client kingdom in the Roman empire with Herod as king, a spiritual son of David and Solomon. Herod first enlarged the temple terrace to the north, cutting part of the hill north of the temple away, as it may be seen in the artificial scarp at the northern end of the Haram; at the same time he levelled the moat and valley, the old northern protection of the temple enclosure (cf. above). To the south he enlarged the platform by terracing on pillars, and also to the west across the Tyropoion Valley.
This created the largest open space in any city from the Classical Age. It measured 485 by 280 m with a height of 50 m, the present Haram in the Old City. On this platform he built one of the most remarkable building complexes ever constructed in Palestine. The old temple was not torn down completely, but was rebuilt on the old foundations, believed to be the original foundations for the pre-exilic temple. In its division in three parts, Vestibule, Holy Place and Holy of Holies (or the Most Holy Place), it continued the tradition from Zerubbabel’s temple; a tradition which may also be seen in the two forecourts, the Court of Priests and the Court of Israel, separated from the outside world by a balustrade with warnings to non-Jews against trespassing on penalty of death.
But he added two forecourts, one inside the balustrade the Court of Women, and one outside the balustrade the Court of Gentiles. He surrounded the forecourts with porticos, and thus changed the building complex into a Hellenistic monumental building. The specific Jewish sacred area occupied but one third of the entire space, the rest could be described as a northern and a southern agora (the name taken from the market place in Classical Athens, surrounded by porticos). Probably already the old temple was in the Hasmonaen period surrounded by porticos (in Greek stoa), and Herod took over the eastern portico called Solomon’s Portico, from the earlier forecourt; on the other sides of the expanded temple terrace he built new porticos; they were double colonnades, i.e. colonnades with two aisles. The most magnificent, The Royal Portico (Stoa basileia) was situated on the south side, it had three aisles with a centre aisle 31 m high, 33 m broad and 185 m long. Only the temple itself, with its 46 m and the towers of Antonia stood higher; in this connection it should be borne in mind that in Herod’s times the higher land towards the west and the north-west was not yet built
64 upon; the temple, on its terrace in what was the north-eastern corner of the city, towered and dominated the city completely.
The whole temple had seven “spheres”. Entering from the outside, one proceeded through the Court of Gentiles, the Court of Women, the Court of Israel, the Court of Priests, the Vestibule, the Holy Place and finally the Holy of Holies. It was like a journey through the seven planetary spheres, a Hellenistic concept linked to astrology, and it was, I believe, meant to send a signal to the Hellenistic-Roman world: here, in Jerusalem, is the true kosmos to be found. It made Jerusalem a counterpart to Rome, the capital of the Augustan Empire, and made Herod an equal of the emperor.
The temple must have looked like the Acropolis of Athens or at least of Pergamon, towering above Jerusalem. It was, I believe, designed to serve primarily as a the Jewish place of worship, everything else was unthinkable, but it was also designed to be an agora, a market place and a centre of Greek-Hellenistic thinking, like the Agora in Athens with its Stoa. It was a grandiose attempt to make Judaism respectable and assimilate it with other Hellenistic religions. This was the place, where the oldest religion of the world, Abraham’s religion, had created its apex in the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22), and the place where King Solomon had built his temple (2. Chronicles 3, 1). And Herod intended, I believe, that this religion should now be united with the other religions in the Hellenistic-Roman world.
Herod began his restoration of the temple in 20/19 BC, but he died long before the building had been completed; only in 64 AD was the project finished.
When Herod died 4 BC, the emperor Augustus divided his kingdom between his sons. The largest part, Samaria, Judaea and Idumaea was given to Archelaus (4 BC-6 AD) with the title ethnarc. Galilee and Perea were given to Herod Antipas (4 BC-39 AD) with the title tetrarch (he was the king who beheaded John the Baptist, and he founded Tiberias at the Sea of Gennesaret), while other parts of the kingdom in the north were given to Philip (4 BC-34 AD) with the title tetrarch, and a small piece of land along Jordan and another at the coast were given to Salome, Herod’s sister. The exemption from taxes, which had been given to Herod, was abolished, and already after ten years, in 6 AD, Archelaus was banished. His lands were administered by a Roman procurator, the best
65 known is of course Pilate (26-36 AD), the procurator who condemned Jesus to the death penalty, probably in 33 AD.
Even if Herod’s successors possessed only a fraction of his power and influence, his grandson Herod Agrippa succeeded in restoring most of Herod’s kingdom. He was raised at the court of Tiberius together with Claudius and made friends with the later emperor Gaius Caligula. When Tiberius died 37 AD, Gaius Caligula (37-41 AD) appointed him king of the northern parts of Philip’s tetrarchy, and when Herod Antipas was removed by the emperor in 39 AD, he received also Gallilee and Perea. He happened to be in Rome in 41, when Caligula was assassinated, and played a certain role in the negotiations after the murder, resulting in Claudius’ peaceful accession to the throne without a civil war. As a reward the emperor gave him also Samaria, Judaea and Idumaea, and Agrippa succeeded in re-establishing Herod’s kingdom. It was he, who persecuted the Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 12, 1-23 where he is called Herod). Even if he reigned only 41-44 AD in Jerusalem, he expanded the city and gave it its greatest size until the modern times, incorporating the present Christian Quarter and Bezetha into the city by building the so-called “Third Wall”, where the present north wall of Jerusalem lies today. This building of walls was, however, interrupted by the procurator of Syria, who felt the building of walls as a threat to the Roman supremacy. Later the walls, however, were finished.
When Herod Agrippa died, the emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) placed his kingdom under direct Roman rule and appointed a governor, who resided in Caesarea. Under the following governors, especially Felix (52-60 AD) and Gessius Florus from 64 AD the relations between the Jewish population and the Roman authorities deteriorated rapidly. At the same time the economic conditions for the population became worse, and great tensions between an upper class, supporting the Roman rule, and other part of the Jewish population grew. In the end it resulted in open rebellion against the Romans. It began, when the daily sacrifices in the temple for the emperor in the temple were suspended, and at the same time the rebels took Herod’s fortress and palace on Masada at the Dead Sea. The rebellion spread to the whole of Palestine and at the beginning seemed to succeed. A Roman army was beaten by the Jews, but the emperor Nero (54-68 AD) appointed one of his best generals, Vespasianus, to lead the army, and he captured the Coastal Plain and Samaria in 68 AD. Nero was overthrown and committed suicide, and within one year there were three emperors, which of course hampered the war against the Jews; but in 69 Vespasianus (69-79
66 AD) was proclaimed king by the legions, and his son Titus continued the war. Jerusalem was captured 70 AD, and the war was finished by general Silva, who finally captured Masada in 73 AD and put an end to the rebellion.
Although it seems that Titus personally wished to temple to be spared, it was burnt down, and the whole city was destroyed and many of its inhabitants killed. Jerusalem’s walls were torn down, and the Temple Mount was filled with ruins.
Excavations south and west of the Haram have demonstrated the extent of the destruction, all buildings on the terrace were apparently destroyed. At the same time the temple treasures were plundered and taken to Rome as booty. The city was henceforth garrisoned by the X Legion Fretensis, whose camp, or what we would name barracks, was placed in the south-western part of present Jerusalem, in the Armenian Garden.
Judaea was made into an independent province governed by a legate having senatorial rank, and the X Legion was placed under his command. A second rebellion occurred under the emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD). It was – among other things – triggered by the emperor’s decision to build a Roman colony in Jerusalem, and possibly a wish to build a temple for Jupiter on the Temple Mount and a prohibition to ban circumcision, and was a parallel to the Maccabean rebellion against Antiochus IV Epiphanes’. The rebellion was led by a man, who called himself Bar Kochba, Son of the Star, a Messianic title, and occurred in the years 132-135 AD. This rebellion saw the first attempt to rebuild the temple.
The rebellion was crushed, and Hadrian now, in order to avoid new attempts at rebellion, changed the character of Jerusalem. Jews were on penalty of death forbidden to set foot in the city, and it seems he planned to build a temple on the Temple Mount, a plan which however was apparently not carried through. He made the city into a Roman Colony and changed its name to Aelia Capitolina, Aelia after his second name (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) and Capitolina after the so-called Capitoline Triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, or in Greek (the language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, Zeus, Hera and Athene. Aelia Capitolina became a true Roman colony with the usual town plan, albeit with some modifications dictated by the shape of the landscape.
67 The walls of the city had approximately the same course as the present walls, at any rate in the north, east and west, and the master grid was the one, we still have to day. From the north from an open space at the present Damascus Gate the cardo, the main street, ran to the south; and from the west from the present day Jaffa Gate at the Citadel towards the east to the Temple Mount ran the main decumanus, the transverse street, like in all Romans colonies. Where they crossed (today where Suq el-Attarin and David Street meet) tetrapylon was situated. Another street branched off from the open space at the Damascus Gate and ran down through the Tyropoion Valley along the Temple Mount and continued all the way down to the southern tip of Ophel, where the Kedron Valley and the Hinnom Valley meet. The square at the Damascus Gate was adorned with a pillar, so even today the Gate is called Bab el-Amud, the Gate of the Pillar, by the Arab speaking inhabitants of Jerusalem.
In the western part of the city, where the old quarries and burial caves were situated before, outside the earlier western wall of Jerusalem, north of decumanus, a massive fill was placed to make the ground even, and there the new forum, market place, of the city was built, a necessary and usual part of a Roman city. Next to this forum a temple for Venus, Aphrodite, was built. The X Legion Fretensis still garrisoned the city with its camp situated in the south-western part of the city.
Judea was made into a consular province, comprising the whole of Herod’s kingdom, and the name of the province was changed into Syria-Palestine, an old name coined by the Greek historian Herodotus for the Coastal Plain. Palestine was henceforth, even until the modern age, the name of the province. During the reign of Diocletian (284-305 AD) Palestine was divided into three smaller provinces, the area around Aelia Capitolina (the old Judaea, Idumaea, Samaria and Perea) was named Palaestina Prima with capital in Aelia Capitolina, while Galilee and Gaulanitis became Palaestine Secunda; the third province with its capital in Petra was called Palaestina Tertia. After Bar Kochba and the destruction of Jerusalem as a Jewish city the Palestinian strongpoint in the Jewish religion and culture became Galilee. And there was now a large Diaspora with a dream of returning to Jerusalem.
68 6
…beyond all hope… 12
Christian Jerusalem
In obscurity a new religion, Christianity, had emerged. It originated from Judaism, and because of this Christianity, when it became a world religion, gave Jerusalem an international importance in the world, over and beyond the importance, Jerusalem had already for the Jews of the Diaspora.
Jesus was an itinerant prophet from Galilee, who preached a new concept of God and the impending Kingdom of God. His followers claimed he was Messiah (in Greek Christos), the Son of God. In connection with the Easter shortly after 30 AD Jesus was accused of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, the highest religious authority in the Jewish commonwealth, and sentenced by the Roman procurator Pilate to death by crucifixion on Golgotha, the place of execution close to the western gate of Jerusalem; he was buried in a burial cave close by. Jesus, like the Old Testament prophets, had a band of disciples, whom he, as apostles, charged with the preaching of the gospel of the Kingdom of God and of himself. Three days after the crucifixion he appeared to his disciples as risen from the dead, and according to Acts God’s Spirit was given to them seven weeks or fifty days after Easter at the Jewish Feast of Weeks, later the Christian Pentecost. Many pilgrims from the Diaspora were in Jerusalem, and the apostles preached the gospel from Jesus and about him as Messiah, and the faith in Christ as Messiah and God’s Son began to spread, at the time being among the Jews. Christian communities arose both in Jerusalem and in Palestine, but also outside in the Diaspora, where Jews lived and had their synagogues.
The Christian faith was not in the beginning seen as a new religion, but as a Jewish heresy, and the Christians were opposed by the Jews and in fact persecuted. One of the persecutors, Saul from Tarsus, a rabbi from the party of the Pharisees, travelled to Damascus on behalf of the Sanhedrin to arrest Christians there, but on the way he received a revelation, after which he became an apostle of Christ. He changed his name to Paul and became a missionary to the gentiles. He changed
12 Eusebius. Vita Constantini 3.28
69 Christianity from a Jewish sect into a religion for all men, both Jews and gentiles. Christianity became a new, independent religion, originating in Judaism, but broken away from it. The faith in Christ became in the course of the next two to three hundred years, in spite of repeated persecutions from the Roman State, the largest religion in the Roman world, and when Constantine the Great (306-337) had become sole emperor 324, the balance tipped to the advantage of the Christian Church, which, instead of being persecuted, now was supported by the state. Sadly, however, the emperor issued an unjust decree in 325, which renewed Hadrian’s prohibition to Jews entering Jerusalem.
In 325 Constantin summoned the bishops of the Christian church to a council in Nicaea in north- western Anatolia close to Constantinopel to settle a number of dogmatic disputes, such as the date of Easter but primarily the Arian controversy on the nature of Christ. The resulting document, the Creed of Nicaea, later modified at the council at Chalcedon 381, and today known as the Nicene- Constantinopolitan Creed, defined the nature of Christ and the Trinity. The important section is the beginning of the second paragraph, on Christ, but also the very formulation of God as the Trinity:
“We believe in one God the Father, almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through Whom all things came into existence, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day according to the scriptures and ascended to heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father….. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, Who proceeds from the Father (and the Son), Who with the Father and the Son is together worshipped and together glorified, who spoke though the prophets….”13
This creed has since been one of the major symbols of the Christian churches. It was certainly throughout the Eastern Roman Empire. When Abd el-Malik later built the Dome of the Rock in
13 Quoted from J.N.D.Kelly: Early Christian Creeds, third edition, Harlow: Longman, pp. 297-98.
70 Jerusalem, he furnished it with an anti-Christian inscription (see below). It is striking, how this text, the oldest Koran-inscriptions, seems to be a direct answer to the Christian Creed. Apparently the author(s) of the inscription in the Dome knew the Christian faith and how to polemize against it.
The bishop of Jerusalem, Makarios, was present as representative of one of the most important dioceses of the church, a congregation from the very beginning of the church at the first Pentecost, and whose first bishop had been James, Jesus’ brother. Makarios asked permission to uncover the tomb of Jesus, which according to tradition was situated below the platform on which the temple of Aphrodite was standing next to the forum, Hadrian had made in Jerusalem. The bishop of Caesarea, Euseb, was also present at the council, and later he told about the events leading to the rediscovery of the tomb in his book Vita Constantini, Life of Constantine. “He (the emperor), deemed it necessary to bring to light in Jerusalem, the blessed place of the Resurrection of the Saviour, so that everyone could see it and venerate it”. Euseb also describes the place where the tomb was situated below the ground and a temple for Aphrodite: “No efforts had been spared to bring earth from elsewhere, the land was covered by raising the ground with fills and covering it with flagstones. The Divine Grotto was thus buried under a mass of packed earth”. When the emperor’s command was executed, the tomb came to the light. “As soon as the command was received, these buildings, built by deceit, were thrown to the ground in their whole height…. And the original landscape reappeared in the bosom of the earth, and behold, the place which had witnessed the Resurrection of the Saviour reappeared beyond all hope, and the Grotto, the most holy place, reflected in a striking manner the return of the Saviour to life”.
The emperor promised to support the building of a church on the place, and to excess the emperor’s mother Helena, a baptized Christian, travelled to Jerusalem, where she, according to a legend, found the three crosses from Golgotha in a cavity in the rock nearby the tomb. She built a basilica on the Mount of Olives at the place, where the Ascension of Christ was supposed to have taken place.
The place where the tomb was uncovered lies in the Holy Sepulchre of today. But was it the true place? In the modern period the place has been contested, it has been maintained that the place cannot be within the walls of Jerusalem, as both Golgotha and the tomb according to the gospels was outside Jerusalem. This view was forcibly maintained in protestant circles in the Anglo-Saxon world, circles, which did not possess the privileges of the old churches in the Holy Sepulchre. In the
71 19. century, when the protestant great powers again gained a real foothold in Jerusalem, an alternative place was promoted.
It began, when the British general C.G.Gordon, later famous when he was murdered in Khartoum, visited Jerusalem in 1883. He was a strongly devoted Christian on the evangelical side of the church, a mystic with a certain aptness for visions, and intuitively he opinionated, without proper arguments, that a locality just north of Jerusalem, called the Calvary, because it looked like a scull, was the real Golgotha. A tomb nearby was henceforth called Gordon’s Tomb. Some months later a large subterranean catacomb was found nearby, at the present Dominican Bible Institute, where the Convent of St. Stephen was in Antiquity; here the inscription: “Private tomb for the deacon Nonnus Onesimus from the Holy Church of Resurrection and this convent” was uncovered. This single person Nonnus Onesimus was later in 1890 in the respected periodical “Palestine Exploration Quarterly” in a pious fraud made into two persons, Nonnus and Onesimus, and one of them was then allotted to the Church of Resurrection and the other to the Convent of St. Stephen, and it was by a sleight of hand maintained, that Gordon’s Tomb from 1867 was the Tomb of Christ, because it was near the Convent of St. Stephen. The site was purchased for means collected in the Anglo- Saxon world and was with the name “Garden Tomb” made into a protestant competitor to the Holy Sepulchre. All is of course hot air, and is an example of American and European religious imperialism without any scientific foundations.
On the other hand there are strong reasons to believe, that the Holy Sepulchre is the authentic place, where Jesus was buried. The place, which is today inside the walls of Jerusalem, and was inside the walls already at the time of Constantine, was, in the time of Jesus, actually outside the walls. The place was, in 325, underneath a heathen temple to Aphrodite and must accordingly have been regarded as an unclean place by the early Christians. And furthermore it was known, that the place lay underneath a colossal fill of earth.
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Fig. 13 Map of Jerusalem in the Byzantine Period. It shows, how the Church of Resurrection (the Holy Sepulchre) was situated inside the walls in this period. Also to be seen are Nea Basilica (New Church of Mary), Zion Church and Bethesda.
That the place in fact was situated outside the walls of Jerusalem, was proved first by Kathleen Kenyon in 1961 in a sounding in a place in Muristan, owned by the Order of St. John, where the Hospital of St. John lay in the period of the Crusades, and later by Ute Lux in excavations in the Lutheran Church of Jerusalem, Erlöserkirche. Here, 13 m below surface a quarry from the period of the Kings was uncovered. It was laid over first by a fill from the 7. century BC, next a fill, nearly 9 m thick, from the 2. century AD, and then on top of these fills cultural fills from the Byzantine and finally fill from the Arab period. There is no reason to doubt that the great fill from the 2. century AD should be connected with Hadrian’s building activities on forum in Aelia Capitolia.
So there must have been a strong tradition of the actual site of the tomb of Jesus. Now we know there was a strong Christian community in Jerusalem from the first Pentecost until the time of Constantine. During the catastrophe in the Jewish War 67-73 the Christians had fled to Pella on the other side of Jordan, but they returned after the war. And we know of pilgrimages around 175 BC to the place at the western wall of Jerusalem, where Jusus’ brother James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, was buried. From the period until Constantine we have no precise documentation of the place were Jesus was buried, only a sermon from between 170 and 10, where it is said that Jesus was slaughtered inside Jerusalem (Melito of Sardes). The place was apparently not accessible. But
73 in the Middle East there was always a tradition to make pilgrimage to a great religious person’s grave, a so-called “weli”, and that must also have been the case of Jesus’ tomb before Hadrian, as it can be seen already in the gospels, when the women went to the grave Sunday morning. Finally the place fits very well into the topographical information we possess from the gospels on the crucifixion and the entombment.
Anyway work immediately began to build a suitable memorial over the tomb, a work lasting more than 50 years. The Holy Sepulchre of today is only in a small part the original Anastasis-Church of Church of Resurrection, which was destroyed and reconstructed with changes several times. But we have a rather good knowledge of the original building: partly from the text of Euseb in Vita Constantini, partly from a number of descriptions written by pilgrims in the first centuries of the history of the church.
One of them, Arculf, visited Jerusalem in the 7. century; his story was written by a monk Adomna and was embellished with sketches drawn by Arculf himself on wax tablets. And finally archaeological investigations in the present church were conducted in connection with a thoroughgoing restoration in the years in the years after 1959 supervised by an international commission.
It was a tripartite church. First an open, circular courtyard was created, by cutting the rock above and around the burial cave away, leaving only a block with the cave itself. The rocks, nearly 5000 cubic meters, were formed into ashlars to be used in the building at the site. Then a small building with a copula, an edicule was erected, over the rock with the cave, where Jesus was buried.
This edicule is known from pilgrim ampullae, so-called Monza-flasks, small amphoras, which were sold to pilgrims, filled with holy water or oil, a custom known also from other pilgrim sites in the church, e.g. Nazareth in Galilee and Abu Mina in Egypt. On these ampullae there is a picture of the edicule above the tomb of Jesus.
Next to the cardo a great basilica, called Martyrion, was erected. It was totally destroyed 1008 and is very difficult to visualize, because excavations have not given sufficient evidence for a reconstruction. The ground-plan, however, is known; the nave measured 42 m with a breath of
74 13,50 m, with an apse towards the west, and with four side aisles; the height was probably to judge from columns reused in other buildings after the destruction 22 m from floor to the ceiling. Towards the east three doors led to a trapezoid atrium, and from this courtyard again three doors leading to the cardo. This basilica was according to Euseb fininished in 335, and it was already seen by the so- called Pilgrim of Bordeaux in 333.
West of the basilica, around the edicule over the tomb, there was in the original design an open court with porticos. In the south-eastern corner of the court Golgotha was situated, formed into a square block and with a golden cross on its top. How long this arrangement existed is unknown, it seems, however, that the building of the lasting monument over the tomb was begun very soon after its completion.
Around the edicule they erected a great rotunda with 12 columns, each with a base measuring 1,75 m in height, a shaft measuring more than 7 m and a capital measuring 1,12 m, all in all nearly 10 m high and with a copula above; outside the columns there was an ambulatory. The rotunda whose name was the Anastasis-rotunda (Resurrection-rotunda), was a new feature in Palstinian architecture. Behind this idea of a martyrion lay the Greek-Roman heroon. Like the Greek cities build a heroon, a memorial for their founder over his grave, the emperor build a heroon over the tomb of Christ, the founder of the new faith, over the grotto where he had conquered Death on Easter Morning, when he arose from the dead.
On Golgotha they built a small church, and another church next to Golgotha; finally a baptistery was built, together with cells for monks and priests and an open garden.
The tripartition, basilica, court and rotunda represents, in a certain way, the tripartition in the temple of Jerusalem: Martyrion with its atrium corresponds to the Vestibule, the court with Golgotha to the Holy and the rotunda with the edicule and the tomb to the Holy of Holies. This tripartition was later inspiratiom for churches in Europa, St. Peter in Rome had a similar arrangement with its focus on the tomb of St. Peter, and Charlemagne built his church in Aix-la-Chapelle, possibly also under influence from the Dome of the Rock. Later inspirations were the cathedral of Nidaros in Trondheim in Norway, and the cathedral in Granada in Spain, where the choir with Charles V’s
75 family graves seems to be a faint echo. Maybe it is even possible to suggest that any church with tripartion into porch, nave and chancel is an echo, if not directly from the temple in Jerusalem.
The whole building complex was finished towards 400 and was a memorial over the tomb of the founder of Christianity. By erecting this monument Constantine and his followers wanted to make the empire he had received from God, as it were, everlasting.
The Martyrion and the Anastasis became destination for pilgrimages from all over the Roman Empire and became centre for a whole tourist industry in and around Jerusalem. And many of the myths, which were tied to the temple and the Rock on the temple platform, were now transferred to the Anastasis. Adam was buried under Golgotha, the cross was seen as a new Tree of Life, and Golgotha was now the mountain of the world, or omphalos, the navel of the world. And of course the sacrifice of Isaac was supposed to have happened there. Also other myths became tied to the place, thus the grotto under the church, where the true cross was found by Helena, was pointed out to pilgrims, as it is still today.
Jerusalem became filled with an untold number of churches; everywhere it was possible to connect the site with Jesus, a church was built. The most important church after to the Anastasis was the Nea Basilica, New Church of St. Mary, built in honour of Jesus’ mother; it was situated on the South-West Hill, placed on a higher level than the Temple Mount, and it dominated, together with the Anastasis and the Church of Zion also on the western hill, Jerusalem completely. In the Church of Zion the room, where the last supper had been held, the same room where the apostles had received the Holy Spirit, was shown.
The three churches on the West Hill stood in contrast to the Temple Mount and reminded the faithful of the victory of the Church over the Synagogue. But, as said, there were many other churches, e.g. Betesda (or Probatica, Sheep’s Pool), where already Herod had built great reservoirs with porticos, now adorned with a church in the middle of the pools in memory of Christ’s healing of the paralytic; the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus had his last talks with his disciples before ascending to Heaven; Getsemane, where Jesus had a vigil last night before the betrayal of Judas and the arrest; and Siloam, where Jesus had healed the man born blind. The walls of Jerusalem were extended, when the empress Eudokia settled in Jerusalem in the middle of the 4
76 century, and Jerusalem had its greatest extent ever, both Siloam, as well as the house of Caiaphas where Peter had denied Jesus, and where a church had been built, were brought inside the walls.
From Madaba in Jordan we have a mosaic from the middle of the 6. century from the emperor Justinian’s reign showing the Holy Land. On it there is a picture of Jerusalem seen from the west, and showing some important features of the city. In the north is the Damascus Gate with the piazza with the pillar, from where Cardo and the street through the Tyropoion valley run towards th south. In the east Stepehen’s Gate is to be seen as well as the deserted Temple Mount with the Golden Gate. In the west, the Anastasis and David’s Gate and the Citadel, and finally, in the south, Nea Basilica and the Church of Zion. All this confirms the archaeological investigations concerning this period of the history of Jerusalem.
Even if it was prohibited for Jews to enter Jerusalem, some still ventured there to lament the temple, and still in the 4. century there was a synagogue in the city; at the same time it is important to remember, that Jerusalem reflected many of the stories from the Bible, on which the Jewish faith rested; and all over the world where Jews were living, Jerusalem was remembered as a Jewish city, and the hope of returning was living all over the Diaspora.
Several times the Jews tried to rebuild the temple. The first time was, as said, during Bar Kochba’s war. The second time was under the emperor Julian Apostata (361-63); he tried to break the “fetters of Christianity”, had Marc Aurelius (161-80) as his ideal, and instituted a religious tolerance (excepting Christianity although); in the wake of this he gave the Jews permission to rebuild the temple. Before they succeeded, however, he was killed near Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia in a campaign against the Parthian arch-enemy. And his successor reinstated Christianity as the official religion in the Roman world.
The third time was in 614 during one of the severest crises in the history of the East Roman Empire. Rome and the Parthian/Persian empire were in perpetual conflict with each other, and under the emperor Heraklion (610-41) the Parthian king Kosroes (590-628) succeeded in invading Palestine. He ordered all churches to be destroyed, only the Church of Nativity in Betlehem should be spared, because it held a picture of the there Magi from the East. The Anastasis was burnt, and the cross of Christ was captured as booty and taken away. Later, however, Heraklion drove back the Parthians
77 in a campaign (622-28) and recaptured the cross, and he rebuilt the church. Also this time the Jews tried to rebuild the temple, but it foundered, mainly because a terrible storm broke, when the building materials should be brought up to the mount, a storm, seen by the Christians as an act of God, and later because Heraklion recaptured Jerusalem.
At this time, near the end of the Byzantine Period, Jerusalem was really a holy city, a city which flourished by virtue of the Christian faith. We know of at least 50 churches in Jerusalem. The city was visited by innumerable pilgrims and was regarded as the centre of the world, of course not politically. At the same time the imperial administration became less and less visible, tellingly it is not possible to point a governor’s residence, probably, however, it was in David’s Tower, which was later the Citadel.
A document from the 6. century, called Breviarius, relates the features to be seen in Jerusalem in for example Constantine’s Anastasis: the Cross of the Lord; the place where the three crosses were found, and where there is an altar of pure gold surrounded by twelve marble columns with twelve silver bowls, here king Solomon sealed the demons. In the middle of the church is the Lance, with which they pierced Jesus. In the courtyard the place, where they crucified Jesus, is to be seen. Also the silver plate, on which was carried the head John the Baptist, and the horn, with which David was anointed, the place, where Adam was formed, the place, where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, the same place Jesus was crucified, the altar where Zechariah was killed (cf. 2. Chronicles 24, 20-22 and Matthew 23, 35), and of course the tomb of the Lord. In the basilica may be seen the Sponge, from which Jesus drank vinegar, and the Cup from the Last Supper. On mount Zion the column, where Jesus was scourged, is to be seen, together with the stone, with which St. Stephen was stoned, also the crown of thorns is there, and the upper room, where the Last Supper took place, and finally the reed the soldiers gave Jesus for a sceptre. Also Caiaphas’ house, where Peter denied Jesus, can be seen, and the house of Pilate. And the pilgrim may see Solomon’s temple, from which only a grotto remains, and finally the pinnacle of the temple, where the devil tempted Jesus.
Life in Jerusalem was characterized by the Christian liturgy, everywhere there were processions, but also by the personal piety, which marked both pilgrims and the usual inhabitants. A testimony of this is to be seen in the so-called Anakreontica, composed by Sophronius, the last bishop of Jerusalem (634-38), who had to surrender the keys of the city to the caliph Omar in 638.
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Sophronius of Jerusalem Anacreontica 19 and 20 (extracts)14
Anacreonticona 20 1 Holy city of God, Jerusalem, how I long to stand even now at your gates, and go in, rejoicing! 5 A divine longing for holy Solyma presses upon me insistently. 7 Let me walk thy pavements and go inside the Anastasis, where the King of All rose again, trampling down the power of death. 15 Through the divine sanctuary I will penetrate the divine Tomb, and with deep reverence will venerate that Rock. 19 And as I venerate that worthy Tomb, surrounded by its conches and columns surmounted by golden lilies, I shall be overcome with joy. 23 Let me pass on to the Tristoon15 all covered with pearls and gold, and go into the lovely building of the place of a Skull. 27 Ocean of life ever living, and of the true oblivion – Tomb that gives light! 29 And prostrate I will venerate the navel-point of the earth, that divine Rock in which was fixed the wood which undid the curse of the tree. 30 How great thy glory, noble Rock, in which was fixed the Cross, the Redemption of mankind! 35 Exultant let me go to the place where all of us who belong to the people of God venerate the glorious wood of the Cross.
14 Taken from J.Wilkinson: Jerusalem Pilgrims, 1977 pp. 91-92. 15 The place with three colonnades, between Martyrion and Anastasis.
79 39 Let me run to bend the knee before the artist’s picture representing the rulers, to render homage. 43 And let me go rejoicing to the splendid sanctuary, the place where the noble Empress Helena found the divine wood; 47 and go up, my heart overcome with awe, and see the Upper Room, the Reed, the Sponge, the Lance. 51 Then I may gaze down upon the fresh beauty of the Basilica where choirs of monks sing nightly songs of worship. 55 And, speeding on, may I pass to Zion where, in the likeness of fiery tongues, the Grace of God descended; 59 where, when he had completed the mystic supper, the King of All teaching in humility washed his disciples’ feet. 63 Blessings of salvation, like rivers pour from that Rock where Mary handmaid of God, childbearing for all men, was laid out in death. 67 Hail, Zion, radiant Sun of the universe! Night and day I long and yearn for thee. 69 There, after shattering hell, and liberating the dead, the King of All, the Shatterer appeared there, the Friend. 73 Then let me leave Zion’s summit and, embracing the stone where for me my Creator was smitten go down to the House and the Stone; 77 And let me fall to the ground and venerate – I am oppressed by tears! – the spot where the foremost of those who love Wisdom heard his own sentence. 78 Let me enter the holy Probatica, where the all-renowned Anna bore Mary.
80 83 And enter the church, church of the all-pure Mother of God, there in veneration to embrace those walls, so dear to me. 87 Far be it from me, passing through the forum, to neglect the place where the Virgin Queen was born in noble palace! 91 May I behold that floor where the paralytic went at the behest of the Healing Word to lift his bed from the ground. 95 Spiritual bliss will fill me when I hymn the glorious sanctuary of Gethsemane, which has received the body, the body of Mary, who gave birth to God. There they have built the tomb for the mother of God. 101 How surpassing sweet thou art, lofty Mountain, from which Christ the Lord looked into heaven!
Anacreonticon 19 …………………. 1 And from that famous valley I will mount those steps, and venerate the Mount of Olives from which he ascended into heaven. 5 Highly will I praise the endless depth of the divine Wisdom, by which he saved me, swiftly I will pass thence to the place, 9 Where, to his venerable companions, he taught the divine mysteries shedding light into secret depths, there, under that roof, may I be! 13 Then let me go out through the Great Door unto the steps, and regard the beauty of the Holy City lying over to the west. 17 How sweet it is to see thy fair beauty, City of God, from the Mount of Olives!
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At this time the Parthian Empire and the Roman Empire had exhausted each other in their century- long strife, a strife we have met already under Herod the Great. Heraklion’s recapture of Jerusalem was a triumph, but only for a short period. A new conquering people with a new religion would soon come to Palestine.
82 7
There is no god but God…. Muhammad is the envoy of God 16
Jerusalem and Early Islam In the year 638 the patriarch Sophronius submitted the keys to Jerusalem to the caliph Omar Ibn el- Khatib after a year of siege, and after the rest of Palestine had been captured by the Muslim armies. Omar was the second caliph after Muhammad who as a prophet had founded a new religion, Islam, which was dictated to him by the angel Gabriel in a series of revelations in a cave outside Mekka, beginning ca. 610. Muhammad, who was born ca. 570, believed that he merely preached a return to the original religion, which God, Allah, had revealed to the Patriarch Abraham. Abraham was later in the Koran, the Holy Scripture, called el-Khalil, or the Friend, and he was the ancestor of both Jews and Arabs through Isaac and Ishmael. In the Koran also several other prophets, known from the Bible, are mentioned, among others Moses, Elijah, Jonah, John the Baptist and as the last before Muhammad, Jesus. But Muhammad had his knowledge of the Bible primarily from Jews, possibly nearly exclusively from them, and even if both Jews and Christians were called the peoples of the Book, Ahl el-Kitab, he reckoned the Christians as heretics, because they believed in the Trinity, and according to his mind this amounted to polytheism. Muhammad maintained a strict monotheism and surrendering to the one God (islam means surrender, and muslim a man who has surrendered himself), and he suppressed all other gods in the Arab world around Mekka. He introduced an aniconic cult, a cult with out images of God: the prohibition against images from the Ten Commandments was to be strictly upheld. At the same time he gave, after long and intense fighting, something new and revolutionary on the Arabian Peninsula, a society based upon a religion and not a tribe or a people, and out of the different tribes he created a new people, a religious “Umma”.
But because of the resistance against his cleansing of idols from the Ka‛ba, Mekka’s old and principal holy building, he was forced to flee into the mountains in 622 together with his friend and father in law Abu Bakr, later the first caliph after the death of Muhammad. They found a refuge in a city ca. 350 km north of Mekka, Yathrib, later called al-Medina – the city. From here he began the war of conquest, which spread the new religion by the help of the sword, and which brought Muhammad back to Mekka in 630; and when he died in 632, the greater part of the Arabian
16 Inscription in the Dome of the Rock, from O.Grabar: The Shape of the Holy 1996, p. 59.
83 Peninsula had converted to the new religion. When Muhammad died, Abu Bakr (632-34) was chosen to be caliph, that is successor, although his son in law Ali had expected to be chosen, and before Abu Bakr died to years later, he appointed a general, Omar, to be the third caliph (634-44). Abu Bakr and especially Omar began an immense expansion of Islam. Syria and Palestine were conquered in 638 after a great battle at the river Yarmouk, today the border between Jordan and Syria, Mesopotamia was conquered in 640, Persia in 643, Tripolis in 647, and at last also Spain was taken in the years following 711, after the strait at Gibraltar was crossed. The Islamic expansion was only stopped in the east in 715 after a battle near Oxus in the present Turkmenistan, and in the west in 732, when the Frankish Charles Martel defeated the Arabian army near Tours in France.
The conquest was helped by mainly two factors. First of all the East Roman Empire had been decisively weakened in the nearly millennium old fight between the Parthians – later the Sassanian Persian Kingdom – on the one side, and the Roman Empire – later the East Roman Empire on the other; we have met this conflict between east and west under Augustus and Herod and latest under the great Persian invasion in 614, where Jerusalem was captured, and every church, except for the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, was destroyed, an invasion finally overcome by Empeor Heraklion. And secondly the whole East Roman Empire was characterized by religious strife between Monophysites, theologians who believed in only one nature in Christ, the divine, on the one side, and the more orthodox Chalcedons or Melkites, who, after the ecumenical council in Chalcedon in 451, maintained two natures in Christ, a divine and a human at the same time. The emperor in Constantinople was, mostly for political reasons, orthodox and suppressed the Monophysites. Because of these oppressions the Monophysites in Egypt and the Levant received the conquest of Islam as a liberation: now they were allowed to keep their faith, if only they paid a poll tax to the Muslim authorities.
A final and perhaps decisive factor was that Muhammad declared Jihad, Holy War, and promised his followers, who would be killed in the war for the expansion of Islam, immediate entrance into Paradise. Only long time later, in connection with the reconquista, the Christian war to regain Spain, was the idea of holy war developed in the Christian world in the west, while the East Roman Empire regarded warfare as a sinful occupation.
84 The people, Muhammad called Ahl el-Kitab, the People of the Book, the Jews and the Christians were allowed to preserve their faith; they were Ahl al-Dhimma, people of the contract. It was guarantied that their life, property and religion were not touched, provided they paid a poll tax, the size of which was not fixed. Heathens, who were regarded as the worst heretics, in case polytheists, were given the choice to be killed or to convert to the new faith. In spite of the tolerance, which was here shown towards the Christians, we have here the embryo for future conflicts, in as much as the status in Islamic society was tied to a certain religion, like in Judaism.
Jerusalem was an important city in the East Roman Empire, a city, which was of course an earthly place, being the place where Jesus had been crucified and had arisen, and so target for pilgrimages; but at the same time Jerusalem was a spiritual city, awaiting the second coming of Christ, which would take place on the Mount of Olives; and also where the new heavenly Jerusalem should come down to earth, and where the last judgement would take place. This belief may be seen in many artistic representations all over the late Roman empire. We have also seen, how many mythological ideas were connected with the Jews at the Temple Mount and with the Christians at the Martyrium and Anastasis.
But because of all the myths connected with Jerusalem, the city was also of crucial importance to Islam. Not the least owing to the tradition connected with the Rock on the Temple Mount, Mount Moriah, of Abraham, who should sacrifice his son Ishmael, the eponymous ancestor of the Arabs there. This story in the Koran has been taken over from the Bible, where the sacrifice was the younger son Isaac, however. The tradition identifying Mount Moriah with the Temple Mount comes from the temple of Zerubbabel, as we have seen.
Probably it was also because of this tradition, and because Muhammad believed he could convert the Jews in Medina to Islam, that he originally fixed the Kibla, the direction towards which to pray, towards Jerusalem. This custom, was perhaps taken over from the Jewish Synagogues, all directed towards Jerusalem, the oldest examples being found in Masada from the period of the Jewish war 67-73. Jerusalem was apparently the holy city before all others, even if Mekka had the Ka‛aba, the most important sanctuary in the Arabian Peninsula, which was later said to have been built by Abraham in an essay to connect him with Mekka.
85 Possibly it is because of Abraham’s attachment to the Temple Mount, that it was identified with Mashdid el-Aqsa, the Remote Mosque, to which Muhammad was taken in the Night-Journey on the horse Buraq by the angel Gabriel, and from where he ascended through the seven spheres to Allah; on the way there he was talking with Jesus, Moses, Abraham and other prophets, before he was taken back; and it was also at this occasion that the prohibition against drinking wine was given, after Muhammad was given the choice between a glass of milk and a glass of milk, and then chose the milk.
When Omar came to Jerusalem, he was according to tradition received by the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius, and taken to the deserted Temple Mount. He went in from the north, where today the Bab el-‛Atim, “Gate of Shadows”, lies, and went to the Rock, where he prayed to Allah, Abraham’s God. The historians of today put a question mark to this tradition, but the later and generally accepted view of Omar’s visit is determined by it. In the course of the following years the temple enclosure was cleared of waste and ruins, and a mosque, in the beginning constructed of timber, was built close to the Rock.
A mosque – Arabic djami – is in essence just a place of prayer – mashdid – where Muslims assemble to pray. It is an open space with a covered end with a prayer niche – mihrab - showing kibla, first towards Jerusalem and later towards Mekka. Probably a mosque is a copy of the first mosque, Muhammad’s house in Medina, which had an open space in front, where Muhammad assembled the believers for prayer. There was a zulla – place of shadow, an open shed of reeds on trunks from palm-trees, to protect against the sun both at the northern end and the southern end of the open space. First kibla was towards the north, but it was soon changed towards the south, and zulla was expanded there. Because of this, it is important to remember, also for the following history until the present day, that the whole of Haram el-Sharif, as the Muslim call the Temple Mount, was made into a mosque, not only the building of wood on the Mount. I the courtyard there is, as always in a mosque, a basin for ritual ablutions.
After Omar had visited the Temple Mount and prayed at the Rock, he was taken through Jerusalem and was shown the Anastasis and the Martyrium, the most splendid monument in Jerusalem, which held, what was to a Muslim the tomb of the prophet Jesus. While he was there, it is told, it was prayer time, and it was proposed to place a prayer rug in the nave that he could pray. He, however,
86 denied to pray in the church and went outside to the stairs leading up to the church and prayed there, saying that if he prayed inside the church, his followers would claim it and turn it into a mosque. A mosque, the Omar Mosque, was in commemoration built opposite the Martyrium. It is in a way regrettable that Omar denied to pray in the church, if turned into a mosque it would have been saved from its later destruction in 1008.
The Muslims called the city Bait el-Maqdis – The Holy House, from God's temple which Solomon had built, or later simply al-Quds, the Holy; the city was also called Iliya from Hadrian’s name for the city Aelia Capitolina, or finally al-Balat after palatium – the royal palace. And of course also the old name Jerusalem was used, even if in early texts in the form Urishallum. But Jerusalem was never the capital in the province called Jund Falastin; the capital was Ramla on the Coastal Plain, founded in the years 710-12 by Suleyman, brother of the caliph Walid I (705-15), and made capital in 716. This meant that Jerusalem, also under the new Muslim rule, could keep its nature as a predominantly holy city, a religious rallying ground and symbol, the character, Jerusalem had acquired in the Byzantine Period.
The caliph Omar was succeeded by Uthman (644-56), and his successor was Ali, Muhammad’s son in law and cousin (654-61). His election to caliph triggered a civil war, Ali was murdered 661, and the power went to Mu’awiyya (661-680), who was governor in Syria and also the prophet’s father in law. Mu’awiyya was the founder of a dynasty called the Omayyads, and Damascus became capital of an empire, which eventually stretched from Indus to the south of France.
Jerusalem had as mentioned great importance as a holy city also in Islam, and in 661-62 Mu’awiyya had the tribal chiefs swearing their oath of loyalty there. His successors, the Omayyads, rebuild the Temple Mount to its former glory. After them the platform is called Haram el-Sharif, the Glorious Holy Enclosure. The importance of Jerusalem has by some authors been interpreted in political terms, as the city could be used to counterpoise Mekka by the Omayyad dynasty, but in reality the importance could be purely religious, derived from the holiness which already characterized Jerusalem, and because it had been the site of Solomon’s temple. The Omayyads built two monuments, which even today distinguish Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa-Mosque.
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Fig. 14. Plan of the Dome of the Rock and the Dome of the Chain. The picture has east to the left.
The most important monument, Qubbet el-Sakr or the Dome of the Rock, which is often wrongly called the Mosque of Omar, was built in the years 691-92 by the caliph Abd el-Malik (685-705). The building is in itself not a mosque, even if the believers often pray there, it is the whole Haram el-Sharif, which is a mosque, as pointed out above. The Dome is a martyrium, a heroon, a memory to Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, the sacrifice which according to the Koran took place there. But it is also a memory to Muhammad’s Night Journey and ascension to heaven, as mentioned above too.
The centre of the Dome of the Rock is the Rock, which still today is shown under the dome, fenced in by a wooden grille, made by Saladin when he recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 during the Crusades. Under the Rock there is a grotto or cave, possibly an old cistern, it is the grotto which was revered by the Jews according to Breviarium. The Rock itself is marked by many hollows of unknown age and provenance.
88 The Dome of the Rock was, according to Arabian lore, not a new creation, but a reconstruction of or pendant to other and older buildings, real or mythological, which were called mihrab, a prayer- niche with a copula in a mosque. The Dome is thus an ideological counterpart to the Ka‛ba in Mekka, a cubic sanctuary in a holy precinct, believed to have been built by Abraham. The Ka‛ba was originally a place where several gods were revered, Allah, first and foremost, but also Allah’s daughters, the three goddesses Allat, Manat and al-Uzza. But Muhammad cleansed it when he conquered Mekka in 630. Later it had been besieged by an Omayyad army, who fought a caliph Ibn-Zubair, and had been burned to the ground in 783. Ibn-Zubair had rebuilt the Ka‛ba after specifications, which he claimed was the form in the time of Abraham, and which he claimed to have been given by Muhammad; but Ibn-Zubair was killed in 692, his building torn down, and the building restored to the form, the Ka‛ba had in the time of Muhammad’s lifetime.
The Dome in Jerusalem was also a re-creation of the legendary temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, whach was known to have been situated there, and which was by the Arabs called Maharib Suleiman, because before this building another Building Mihrab Dawud, the palace of David, had stood there; Solomon had completed, what David initiated, henceforth the plural maharib. Among the Arabs there was but little knowledge of Solomon’s temple, and the descriptions of it in Arab literature of the period make it look like the Dome of the Rock and are probably influenced by it. But stress was laid on the colours which after these descriptions had characterized Solomon’s temple.
The decorations in the Dome of the Rock are also a proclamation of its continuity with Solomon’s temple, for example the Tree of Life depicted on the walls like in the temple: Paradise itself is situated here, and also there are many imperial symbols, pointing to Jerusalem as the city of the king.
Farther away there was another ideal, a legendary but nevertheless real palace in Sana’a, the capital of the Sabaean kingdom in South Arabia, called Ghumdan. The palace was built in the beginning of the millennium, but had been destroyed in the beginning of the 7. century. This palace was supposed to have been built by a certain IlsharahYahdib, but is ascribed also to other builders, among whom, importantly in our context, king Solomon who also according to the Bible had connections with the Sabaean kingdom, in the Bible called Sheba. This palace was a cornerstone in
89 the so-called early Arabian renaissance, which originated in South Arabia, and which was later a tool for Islam. When Abd el-Malik built the Dome of the Rock he established ties back the the first temple of Jerusalem, but also to the early Arabian powers in the south, and to the early Arabian religion in Mekka.
The Dome of the Rock is a rotunda with twelve columns and four pillars, placed around the Rock. On top of the pillars a drum is placed and on the top of the drum a copula. Around the rotunda there is an octagonal ambulatory. The dome is therefore first and foremost a counterpart to the Anastasis- Rotunda, also a rotunda on an octagon, around and over the Rock, with the tomb of Christ inside. The Dome of the Rock also has roughly the same dimensions as the Anastasis-rotunda, but stands a little higher. The meaning is obviously that here, on the Haram, is the true centre of the world, here is the true mountain of the world, and not in the Martyrium with the Anastasis in the other end of Jerusalem.
Most clearly the anti-Christian tendency is to be seen in the great inscription, a parallel to the pictures. It runs on the inside of the drum and is 240 m long. These inscriptions were set up by Abd el-Malik, even if his name was later removed by the later Abbasid caliph Ma’amun in 831 and replaced by his name. They are the oldest Koran inscriptions known, more than 200 years older than other datable quotations of any length from the Koran, and the question has been put, whether they in reality are older or at least contemporary with the corresponding citations in the Koran. The following quotations are but extracts of the full text.17
”In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, there is no god but God, One, without associate. Say He is God alone, God the eternal, he does not beget nor is he begotten and there is no one like him” (Sura 112).
“Muhammad is the envoy of God. Indeed God and his angels bless the prophet; Oh, you who believe send blessings on him and salute him with full salutation” (Sura 33, 56).
“Indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was an envoy of God and his word he bestowed on her as well as a sprit from him. So believe in God and in his envoys and do not say “three”; Desist, it is
17 The quotations are from O.Grabar: The Shape of the Holy pp 59-61.
90 better for you. For indeed God is one God, glory be to Him that He should have a son. To him belong what is in heaven and what is on earth and it is sufficient for him to be a guardian. The Messiah does not disdain to be a servant of God, nor do the angels nearest (to Him). Those who disdain serving Him and who are arrogant, he will gather all to Himself” (Sura 4, 171-7).
Bless your envoy and your servant Jesus son of Mary and peace upon him on the day of birth and on the day of death on the day he is raised up again. This is Jesus son of Mary. It is a word of truth in which they doubt. It is not for God to take a son. Glory be to Him when he decrees a thing. He only says “be” and it is. Indeed God is my Lord and your Lord, therefore serve Him; this is the straight path”. (Sura 19, 33-36).
“God bears witness that there is no God but he, (as do) the angels and those wise in justice. There is no God but he, the all-mighty, the all-wise. Indeed the religion of God is Islam. Those who were given the Book did not dissent except after knowledge came to them (and they became) envious of each other. Whosoever disbelieves in the signs of God, indeed God is swift in reckoning”. (Sura 3, 18-19).
“Muhammad is the servant of God and his envoy, whom He sent with guidance and the religion of truth to proclaim it over all religions, even though the polytheists hate it” (Sura 9, 33 or 61, 9).
These sentences are first and foremost anti-trinitarian. Behind lies an accusation for heresy close to polytheism. On the other side the text recognizes that Jesus has a place apart compared to all earlier prophets, as the text mentions his birth as God-willed, but with the reservation: “This is Jesus son of Mary”, not son of God, but his resurrection from the dead is mentioned. The text shows clearly that the Dome of the Rock is a counterpart to the Anastasis and a continuation of Solomon’s temple on the Temple Mount.
In the southern end of the terrace, opposite Nea Basilica (St. Mary) on the other side of the Tyropoion Valley, Abd el-Malik built a great mosque, Mashdid el-Aqsa, or the Remote Mosque, because, as related above, tradition claimed the Muhammad’s Night-journey to the Remote Mosque on the hose Buraq was to this place. This building replaced the wooden mosque existing at least ca. 650, when it was seen by Arculf.
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Originally it was a rectangular pillar-hall, a building with a nave and 14 side aisles, 7 on each side of the nave, and it was orientated towards Mekka. It was altered many times in the course of history and got its present form in the reign of the Fatimids in Egypt in the year 1035, when it was restored after an earthquake. When the last of the Omayyads after the war with the Abbasids in 750 was forced to flee to Spain and made a rival caliphate in Cordoba, the Aqsa Mosque became a model for the great Mosque in this town, the Mesquita. There, in Cordoba, it is possible today to get an idea of the greatness of the original Aqsa Mosque.
On the spot, whence the prophet Muhammad was taken through the seven heavens, two small copulas were built after the Crusader Period, the Dome of Gabriel, where the horse Buraq landed to carry him, and the Dome of the Prophet, where he mounted the horse to return to Mekka.
East of the Dome of the Rock the smaller Kubbet el-Silsele, the Dome of the Chain, is situated. The name derives from a chain hanging in it. This building is unique, it is a hexagon – a six-sided figure on six columns, surrounded by an eleven-sided polygon on eleven columns, all in all 17 columns placed in a way, that is it possible to see all the columns at one time. It is with its diameter of 14 m the third largest building on the Haram. It was originally covered with mosaics on the inside. Its function is not known; some have meant it was a treasury like in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus or other mosques to hold the treasure of the community, but this seems to be improbable in view of the open and easy access, it I not suited for this purpose. From a point in time the dome became connected with the eschatological fantasies of the Day of Judgment, connected with the Haram: the chain hanging from the Dome will let the good pass and stop the wicked; but this cannot have been the original idea with the dome.
Its significance should rather be sought in connection with its site. The dome stands on the spot where the two axes meet and diagonals intersect, or the exact centre of the Haram. It is the only building which is not placed askew; at the same time it is on line with a secondary mihrab or prayer niche in the Aqsa-Mosque, and it is situated in the area of Haram, to which Omar’s visit is connected. The earliest instance, where the dome is mentioned, is from ca. 850, but it may well be older, and nobody knows who built it. Probably although, one of the Omayyad caliphs, who in this way wanted to commemorate the Omar’s visit in 638. Another and plausible theory links the dome,
92 as it is build in the centre of the Haram, with Omphalos, the navel of the earth, which in the Byzantine Period, and still among the Christians, was believed to be situated in the Holy Sepulchre.
Little by little all the legends which had been connected with the temple, and which had been usurped by the Christians to the Anastasis, were brought back to the Haram: The Rock is the mountain of the world, the Last Judgment will take place there, the souls are until then kept in a second grotto below the grotto under the Rock, Adam is buried here and so forth. But most important it became customary to pray at the Haram, when making the pilgrimage to Medina and Mekka, a custom which has later become a religious duty for Muslims.
Below the Haram to the south Abd el-Malik built a great palace, the foundations of which have been uncovered in excavations since 1961. It was probably a residence for the caliph, when he stayed in Jerusalem, and it was connected with the Haram by a bridge to the El-Walid-Gate.
The Palaces, of which we know only ground-plan, must have looked like the desert castles, which in this period were built in many palaces in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts, the best examples are Qasr al-Kher al-Sharqi and Qasr al-Kher al-Gharbi in Syria, Qasr el-Kharaneh in Jordan, and Khirbet el-Mefjar near Jeriko in the Jordan Valley. When the palaces were built, the street through the Tyropoion Valley, called el-Wad, was led around the palaces and down to a gate Bab Jubb Aramiyya at the old Siloam.
A limited number of Jewish families were allowed to settle in Jerusalem, the first Jews since 135, showing a tolerance, which is in contrast to the Christian intolerance in the Byzantine Period, but of course the Jews were not considered heretic in the same degree as the Christians, they were not polytheists. At the same time a large part of the population in Palestine converted to Islam, even if there was still many Christians especially in the north; the process was also, understandably, slower in Jerusalem than in the rest of the country; only after several hundreds of years the city became predominantly Muslim.
After a rebellion, which began in Persia, the Omayyad dynasty was in 750 replaced by the Abbasids, who descended from Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas. The last Omayyad fled to Spain where he created an independent emirate with Cordoba as its capital. This fight, between the
93 Omayyads and the Abbasids, was in reality a continuation of the old conflict between west – the Roman Empire and the Hellenistic-Roman culture and the east – the Parthian kingdom with its Persian culture, but now between Sunni and Shi’a, two parties, which had crystallised in the wars around Muhammad’s son in law Ali and his sons Hassan and Hussein, which ultimately led to the Omayyad victory. The Abbasids built a new capital on the Euphrates, Bagdad, and the interest in Damascus and Jerusalem was diminished.
More and more taxes were levied on the Jew and on the Christians, there was especially a great pressure on the Christians, and at the same time it was more and more difficult to go to Jerusalem for the growing number of pilgrims. To make things easier a delegation was sent in 797 from Jerusalem to Charlemagne (768-814, German-Roman emperor 800). Charlemagne asked the caliph in Bagdad, the famous Harun al-Rashid (786-809) to make the conditions for the Christian pilgrims easier, but also for the indigenous Christians, and in the course of time friendly relations between the two rulers were established. For Charlemagne it was a triumph for the new centre in the west, and he built a copy of the Dome of the Rock (or the Anastasis) in Aix la Chapelle, but for Harun al- Rashid, on the other hand, it was probably mainly viewed upon as trade relations.
Charlemagne built a complex of buildings in the present Muristan with monasteries for monks and nuns with a hostel for the pilgrims. These institutions were paid for from gardens in the Kedron Valley, which Charlemagne had acquired. He also built a monastery at Hakeldama in the Hinnom- Valley, where Judas had hanged himself.
After the death of Charlemagne the conditions for the Christians again worsened. Palestine came under Egyptian rule (Tulunids, Ikhshids, Fatimids 909-1171), after Egypt had broken loose from the caliphate in Bagdad. Again it became more and more difficult to make pilgrimages, and things went completely wrong, when the Fatimid Hakim became caliph (996-1171). He claimed to be an incarnation of Allah and ordered in 1009 all churches in his caliphate destroyed, also the Martyrium and the Anastasis. The work went far, only the Anastasis-Rotunda was not completely destroyed, before he changed his mind; but the Rock above the tomb of Jesus was cut away completely, so apparently only the stone, on which the body of Christ was laid, was left. The work stopped, because Hakim shortly before his death changed his mind and allowed a rebuilding of the church. The church was, however, only partly rebuilt in 1048 by the Byzantine emperor Konstantin
94 Monomakos (1042-49), and was only an afterglow of the earlier splendid building complex. The Martyrium had been levelled to the ground and was never rebuilt, and only the Anastasis rotunda and the courtyard with Golgotha was rebuilt, and the rotunda furnished with an apse towards the east.
In this period the Christians were settled in the north-western part of the city, the beginning of the four quarters, we know today in Jerusalem.
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Deus le volt18 Crusaders and Ayyubids In the 11. century Western Asia was invaded by nomads from Central Asia, the Turcomans, or the Turks, who had converted to Islam after meeting the Persian dynasty the Samanids in the 10. century. At the beginning they settled as nomads, or they became mercenaries. At the same time the Abbasid caliphate in Bagdad was weakened, Egypt had long ago broken away; and in 1055 a Turkish family, the Seldjuks, created a sultanate in Bagdad and made the Abbasids rulers in name only. In 1073 the Seldjuks captured Jerusalem, and in 1071 the Turks lead by the Seldjuk Alp Arslan (1063-72) defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanos (1067-71) in a decisive battle at Manzikert in Eastern Anatolia, after which the Seldjuks conquered most of Antolia and created a sultanate in Nicaea, close to Constantinople, where the council in 325 had taken place. The situation of the Eastern Roman Empire was now so desperate, that one of the following emperors, Alexios (1081-1118), asked for help in the west. Further to the south the Seldjuks captured Damascus in 1076, and in 1094 Alp Arslan founded the Seldjuk dynasty in Aleppo. But the dynasty was not capable of exercising authority, anarchy prevailed, and there was everywhere war and disorder. Communications suffered during these disorders, and it was only possible to travel through Anatolia and Syria with an armed escort, while at the same time hostile authorities everywhere stirred up difficulties, if the pilgrim did not happen to run into a local war. Conditions in Jerusalem were tolerable until 1095, when the whole Levant sank into petty states and anarchy, while at the same time the Fatimids in Egypt tried to reconquer Jerusalem. The conditions for the Christian pilgrim had become intolerable.
Instigated by these circumstances, which were well known in the west, pope Urban II preached crusade on a synod in Clermont in France in 1095. Crusades were known from the “reconquista” in Spain, and it lay near at hand in this situation to wage a similar war to the east. The pope mentioned the cry for help from Alexios and the need of the pilgrims, and he promised the would-be crusaders forgiveness from all sins. His motto was: “Deus le volt”, and with a clever staging he carried the enthusiastic crowd with him, everybody fastened a red cross on their shoulder and swore to liberate the Holy Land. An army was raised under the generalship of Robert of Normandy, Godfrey of
18 God will it! Cry from the knights at Clermont.
96 Bouillon, Baldwin of Flandres, Robert II of Flandres, Raimond of Toulouse, Bohemund of Tarentium (Sicily and South Italy was at this time under Norman rule) and Tancred of Normandy, a predominantly Frankish-Norman force. The army assembled near Constantinople in 1097 and marched south through Asia Minor and through the Levant, where it, with great difficulties and with hunger, thirst and fatigue, nevertheless annihilated all resistance on its way. The crusaders reached Jerusalem June 7, 1099, where the army could see the city from Mount Scopus northwest of the city, and after 5 weeks of siege the city was gained July 15, the walls being penetrated at their weakest point, at the north wall east of the Damascus Gate, where the city was and is still protected only by dry moat in front of the wall; later a golden cross was raised on a tower in the wall as a memorial of the conquest.
The first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon (1099-1100), however, would not be entitled king, but called himself Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. When he died a year later, his successor Balwin (1100-18) was crowned as a king. Godfrey resided on the Haram al-Sharif, in a wing of the Aqsa Mosque, while later the kings moved to the Citadel, called David’s Tower.
The Christian knights massacred the greater part of the Jews and the Muslims and expelled the rest, making Jerusalem a purely Christian city, even if it in the beginning was extremely sparsely settled, and the Crusaders had to entice new inhabitants to the city by the help of economic incitements, for example Christians from Palestine and from the borderlands between present Syria and Jordan. The Syrians were settled in the former Jewish Quarter in the north eastern part of the city, while the Armenians in the south western part near to the Cathedral of St. James, today the Armenian Quarter. Also from many other nations people settled, Spaniards, French and Germans to mention the most important.
Throughout the period of the Crusades there was a desperate need for settlers from the west; the crusader states were characterized by a thin upper crust of settlers from the west with Latin rites, and a vast indigenous population of Muslims or Christians, predominantly Greek-Orthodox; the proportions of Muslims and Christians varied from landscape to landscape. The rather few settlers from the west kept the indigenous population in check by the strong crusaders fortresses, built at strategic points. One of the great problems of the crusader states was that most of the knights
97 coming from the west on crusades, or as pilgrims, came to visit the holy places and had no wish to settle, even if they were often begged to do so; they preferred to return to their estates in Western Europe. And a new, second crusade (1147-49), instigated by Bernhard of Clairvaux and led by the emperor Conrad III from Germany and Louis VII of France, was to no avail.
The strongest defenders of the crusader states and protector of the pilgrims were the knights in the military orders or monastic orders, first and foremost the Templars from 1118 and the Hospitallers or the Order of St. John from 1113, while the Teutonic Order of St. Mary from Acre, from the third crusade, and the Order of St. Lazarus from the 1140s, which was specifically for leper knights, had lesser importance. These orders was a new concept in the Christian church, and they became important for the whole concept of warfare in the Christian world and church, as it was now theologically argued that it was a good deed to go to war to defend Cristianity, especially the great abbot Bernhard of Clairvaux was active in promoting these theological ideas of a Christian “Jihad”.
Fig. 15 Jerusalem in the crusader period.
98 Jerusalem again became characterized by Christian buildings, which today are found in excavations, as late as in 1968 a German hostel and church was found on the western hill opposite the Haram. There was a great building complex at Muristan south of the Holy Sepulchre with churches and monasteries, among those the Church of the Saviour, where today the Lutheran Erlöser Kirche is situated.
At Probatica, the Sheep’s Pool or Betesda, as a re-creation of the earlier Byzantine church there, a new church was built, it was however smaller; and at the same time a church, St. Anne, was built nearby in memory of the birth of Mary, Jesus’ mother, where Anna’s and Joachim’s house had been situated there (cf. Anacreontica above p. 78); this church became the most beautiful example of Romanesque architecture in Palestine, and it is preserved until today, perhaps because Saladin converted it into a Muslim madrase (school). Also at Siloam and other holy places churches were built, all in all we know of 61 churches from the period, although only few of them have been actually found. The present grid of streets in Jerusalem originates from the crusader period, for example the three covered bazaars north of the intersection between Cardo (to day the continuation of Khan el-Zeit) and Decumanus (David Street).
The Holy Sepulchre was restored and acquired the size and form, it has today, and it was converted into a Latin, Roman-Catholic church. Also Haram el-Sharif, the Temple Mount, was taken by the Christians. The Haram belonged from 1118 to the Templars, taking their name from the Temple Mount. They had their headquarters in the Aqsa Mosque, which they called Templum Salomonis, believing it to be the palace of Solomon, the arcades below the platform they used as stables for their horses, which is why they are today called Solomon’s Stables. The Dome of the Rock, which the Templars called Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord, believing it to be the temple of Solomon, was consecrated to be a church, and a cross was placed on top of the dome. Inside the Dome the Rock was covered with marble, and an iron grille was set up around it to protect the holy place. This building acquired a great importance in European iconography, where paintings depicting the circumcision of Jesus in the Temple shows the Dome of the Rock, and thereby made the building known in Europe.
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Fig. 17. The Holy Sepulchre after the Crusades. 1 Forecourt; 2 Main entrance; 3 the Edicule with the tomb; 4 Golgotha; 5 Chapel of St. Helena; 6 The cave where the cross was found; 7 Vartan’s Chapel. (After Gibson).
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, however, remained an episode, in Jerusalem lasting until 1187, when Jerusalem from the Muslim and Arab point of view was again liberated, this time from Saladin (1174-93). The success in the First Crusade was possible, because the Islamic Levant was fragmented in petty states, even in mutual strife. But this fragmentation was temporary only. And the support the crusader states had from Byzantium, was in the long run made impossible because of a increasing weakness in the Eastern Roman Empire. The situation became desperate in 1176, when an imperial army was defeated decisively by the Turks in Western Anatolia, a defeat which confirmed the defeat at Manzikert a century earlier, and which forever changed the balance of power in the Middle East. The beginnings of Muslim unity began, when Imad el-Din Zengi from Mosul became ruler in Aleppo in 1128, and the unity grew with his son Nur el-Din (1154-74), who 1154 captured Damascus; he waged wars against the crusaders with great success: His general, the Kurdish Saladin (Salah al-Din), in 1171 became sultan in Egypt, and after the death of Nur el-Din
100 in 1174 he succeeded in conquering Syria little by little, Aleppo was taken 1183, and he created a Muslim unity from Libya to Tigris the first time in 200 years.
At the same time there were constant quarrels among the crusaders and between them and Byzantium, a state of affairs which in the long run was bound to end in disaster. And the populations in their states hated the crusaders for their greed and brutality, bearing in mind that the crusaders were only a minority in the conquered lands. A good illustration of the problems may be seen in the career of Rainauld of Châtillon, especially because he was the direct reason for the final war leading to the fall of Jerusalem. He was one of the knights, who came to Ultremer with king Louis of France in the Second Crusade (1147-49). In Antiochia he married princess Constance, the widow after the earlier ruler prince Raymond, and gained the power. He pressed money from the patriarch of Antiochia by capturing and torturing him, and the money was used to mount an expedition to Cyprus, which, even if the inhabitants were Christian, he nevertheless sacked. In 1160 he was taken prisoner by the Arabs and was kept in the dungeons of the Citadel in Aleppo until 1175. In the meantime Princess Constance had died, and shortly after his liberation he married the heiress to Oultrejourdain, the crusader fief east of River Jordan, and so he became master of Kerak, one of the strongest fortresses in Oultremer. From there he waged war with Saladin, who attacked him, because he plundered the caravans in spite of a treaty which protected them.
The final war began when Rainauld committed piracy on the Red Sea, where the worst atrocity was to attack a ship with pilgrims for Mekka and burn it. The decisive battle in the war took place at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee west of Tiberias July 3.-4. 1187, where the largest army, the crusaders in Jerusalem ever managed to put in the field, was completely routed; the king of Jerusalem Guy de Lusignan (1186-94) and the other princes were either taken prisoner or killed, and Rainauld was beheaded by Saladin personally for his many crimes. In contrast the king was spared and kept his royal status. September 20 the same year Saladin attacked Jerusalem and broke through the walls close to the spot, where the crusaders had done it in 1099, and the city fell September 30. Saladin treated the defeated with clemency, he prohibited a massacre; and the Christians were permitted to buy their own freedom, and also their fellow Christians freedom, from slavery. The Latin patriarch Heraclius was, together with the Frankish inhabitants, allowed to leave Jerusalem in peace, and they left for the coast in caravans under the protection of the Templars, the Hospitallers and the defender
101 of Jerusalem, Balian. The Greek-Orthodox and the Syrian Jacobites stayed I Jerusalem in exchange of paying a poll tax on top of the payment for their freedom.
Saladin then re-consecrated Haram for Islam. He removed the cross on the Dome of the Rock together with every sign of Christian worship, and all traces of the Templars were removed from the Aqsa Mosque. He removed the marble on the Rock and made a wooden guard rail around it, which is still standing; both buildings were sprinkled with rose water and consecrated to Muslim worship. Saladin was advised to demolish the Holy Sepulchre, but he denied, because, as he said, the Christians worshiped the place and not the church as such. However, he restored the church to the Greek-Orthodox community and took it from the Latins, and a Muslim, Arabic family were entrusted the keys, their descendant kept this privilege until 1967. Jerusalem was again Islamised under Saladin and after his death 1193 under his successors, the Ayyubids. Fearing another attack from the western crusaders it was judged necessary to demolish the walls of Jerusalem partly in 1219 to make the city difficult to defend, and Jerusalem was an open city until Süleyman the Magnificent restored the walls in 1536-41. The open city made the inhabitants unsafe, the city being open to robbers and brigands, and this entailed a certain depopulation. From this period originates the division of Jerusalem into four quarters, the Arab, the Armenian, the Christian and the Jewish (in alphabetical order).
The fall of Jerusalem triggered the Third Crusade (1189-92) led by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa from Germany, King Richard the Coeur de Lion from England and King Philippe II Auguste from France. Acre on the coast was retaken, but the crusaders did not retake Jerusalem. Later crusades did not have any lasting results: the sixth crusade led by King Frederick II from Sicily did, it is true, give the crusaders a lease of Jerusalem in 1229, and Frederick was crowned there, but already in 1244 the city was retaken.
The last Christian bastion in Palestine, Acre, was left 1291. The great effort to roll back history, free Jerusalem and force back Islam had failed.
102 9
Ex Oriente Lux Jerusalem from the Mamluks to Napoleon The richest country in the Middle East was Egypt. Surely there had been wars and even crusades, but by and large Egypt had been spared the destructions which had happened in the Levant. Egypt was therefore the power base for the descendants of Saladin (actually of his brother al-‛Adil Abu Bakr). The old capital had been situated at Fustat, while the palaces of the Fatimids were lying in Cairo, north of this city. To consolidate his power Saladin built a citadel on a hill between Fustat and Cairo, which eventually made the two cities to grow together into one. The Ayyubids also consolidated their power with a military force composed of slave soldiers, the so-called Mamluks. They were slaves, who as boys had been acquired in the northern parts of the Caucasus from various peoples there, Circassians, Kiptshaks, Turks or Kurds, and which were then trained to be soldiers. They were supposed to remain single, and if a Mamluk married, he was obliged to leave the corpse. It was a strong military force; the Mamluks were by an Arab author called the “Templars of Islam”, and they were the spear-point in the fight against the crusaders. Eventually their power grew, and in 1250, during the Seventh Crusade, the Mamluks murdered the last Ayyubid sultan Turanshah, and grabbed the power. They created a strong state, conquered Syria and took up the fight against a new wave of invaders from Central Asia, the Mongols, who in the next couple of hundred years fought for the domination of the Levant. One of the most able Mamluk rulers, Baibars (1260-77), fought on two fronts: He defeated a Mongol army at Nazareth in 1260 and afterwards conquered Syria; next he turned upon the crusaders, he took Antiochia in 1268, subsequently Safita and Crac des Chevaliers in Syrian, the stronghold of the Templars and the Hospitallers; also the remaining fortresses were conquered, and finally Acre, Tyrus and Sidon were taken. The crusaders had now lost their last foothold on the Levantine mainland, only the island Arwad on the coast of Syria opposite Tartous was still occupied, and this island fell 1302.
The history of the Mamluks was for the next many years dominated by the fight against the Mongols fro Central Asia. In 1206 Temüddin, a ruler who had brought together the Mongolian peoples of the steppe, was proclaimed Jenghis Khan, Great Khan (1206-27) and began a a series of victorious campaigns, directed both towards the east as well as the west. In 1260 came the first invasion of Syria-Palestine under Hülagü (1256-56), who had captured Bagdad 1258 and executed
103 the last Abassid caliph, but he was beaten off by Baibars at Nazareth. Again in 1299 Syria was for a short while under Mongolian rule, and once more in 1303; but in 1323 the border was stabilised, the land east of a line from Aleppo to Damascus and further to Aqaba belonged to the Mongol ruler, while the lands west of this line belonged to the Mamluks. The last and worst Mongolian invasion came under Tamerlan or Timur Lenk (1369-1405) in 1400. These invasions ravaged the Levant horribly, and on top of this came the epidemics, in particular the Black Death, a plague, in 1348, killing a large part of the population; for example 90% of the population in Cairo was killed by the plague. Palestine inevitably grew, as time went by, poorer and poorer, especially after 1400.
All the same a great building activity took place in Jerusalem under the Mamluks. A number of buildings were erected, madrases (schools), Khans (inns), ribat (hostels), hammam (baths), and suqs (covered markets), as Suq el-Qattanin (the cotton market) next to Haram. Jerusalem was ruler by a governor, who resided in the Citadel, and from 1427 in Jawiliyya, situated at the north-west corner of Haram el-Sharif where Antonia once was situated.
There was a small Jewish population in Jerusalem, and also a small Christian population, living around the Holy Sepulchre. From the 14. century also Fransicans lived there, who in the institution Custodia Terra Sancta had the task of the upkeep of the Christian holy places; they settled near Coenaculum, the building on the South East Hill, the Mount Sion, where the Last Supper was supposed to have taken place. The Christians were, however, frequently persecuted and were at times forbidden to enter the Holy Sepulchre.
Towards 1500 the Mamluk power over Palestine was weakened, and in 1516 the Ottomans under Sultan Selim I (1512-20) took Jerusalem. The Ottomans (the English name for Osmans) had their name from the founder of the dynasty, Osman (1288-1326); they were Turks who were pressed westwards in Asia Minor by the Mongols, and after 1300 they built an empire in Asia Minor and on the Balkans. In 1453 they conquered Constantinople and made it their capital under the name Istambul, and after 1500 they began an expansion towards the south and conquered Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt under Selim, who as the first took the title caliph, and under Süleyman the Magnificant or the Great (1520-66). Under the following caliphs the Ottoman expansion culminated in 1683; but then the decline set in. Especially Russia waged expansion wars against the Ottoman Empire in the 18. century, mostly in the Caucasus. At the same time the Ottoman Empire lost real
104 control with the provinces Bagdad and Egypt. Syria and Palestine were now even more impoverished and became partly depopulated.
Archaeologically it was a new Intermediate Period in the history of Palestine, like the Intermediate periods seen previously between the Early Bronze Age I and Early Bronze Age II, between the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age and between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The land alternates between periods with wealth and agriculture and with many cities, and other periods, where the cities are depopulated and the farmers turned to semi-nomadism or nomadism. The reasons for the occurrence of these intermediate periods are not fully understood, but probably several factors were at play. Sometimes changes in climate and diseases played a role, or over- taxation of the farmers, or like in the Ottoman period a combination of a weak central power, with an economy weakened by wars and subsequent over-taxation. It was also a factor that the European nations at the end of the 15 century found the sea route to India and the Far East and destroyed the profitable caravan trade along the Silk Route from China to Europe which was controlled from Istambul, and that Palestine after the crusades was cut off from the Mediterranean Sea.
In the reign of Süleyman Syria-Palestine was divided into two administrative provinces, one in the north with Aleppo as its capital, and one in the south with Damascus as its capital. A well organized and centralised administration was set up, and the economy was developed. Jerusalem was district capital in a district with a sub-district around Hebron: The governor or pasha of Jerusalem resided in the Jawaliyye north of the Haram with a small garrison, garrisoned in the Citadel.
In the beginning of Turkish rule Jerusalem was neglected like in the last part of the Mamluk period, but under Sülayman the Magnificent progress began. He restored the walls of Jerusalem and built the wall, which still surround the Old City today. He improved Jerusalem’s water-systems by repairing the aqueducts leading the water from Solomon’s Pools south of Bethlehem, and he built six public fountains, of those two were in the Haram. Many religious buildings were renovated, and also secular buildings like e.g. the cotton market were improved.
The population grew, and the authorities inaugurated a census. In 1563 the population of Jerusalem amounted to:
105 11.802 Muslims 1.830 Christians 1.434 Jews making a total of 15.066 inhabitants. There was a great majority of Muslims, but still a considerable number of Christians and Jews.
When the walls of the city were restored, Sülayman issued a firman (decree), which permitted the Jews to pray at the Western Wall of the Haram in the Moghrabi quarter and furnished a small square as a place for prayer. This wall is known as the Kotel to the Jews, or the Western Wall, and is popularly called the Wailing Wall. This place now became the centre of the Jewish worship in Jerusalem.
At the same time many pilgrims came to Jerusalem, both Jews and Christians. In the Royal Library in Copenhagen the diary of Theodor Petræus, a Danish orientalist is kept. He visited Jerusalem in 1656 and has drawn a Jerusalem-cross together with a drawing of the Holy Sepulchre and the name “Hierosolyma” in his diary. He, like other pilgrims, had the cross tattooed on his forearm as a proof of having been in the Holy Sepulchre as a pilgrim.
Another “souvenir” brought home by presumably wealthy pilgrims, was a model of the Holy Sepulchre. These models were elaborate constructions where the roof could be removed to reveal the edicule with the Sepulchre itself.
In the following centuries, already from the time of Süleyman’s successor, interest in Jerusalem waned. The Muslim administration ceased to develop, even to preserve, the city, but was corrupt and despotic. The city, like the rest of the country, decayed; the number of inhabitants decreased, as it may be seen from a census from 1800: 4.000 Muslims 2.750 Christians 2.250 Jews making a total of 9.000 inhabitants.
106 The Jews were maltreated and for a great part moved to Safed in Northern Palestine; also the Christians were harassed, the Franciscans were forced to abandon Mount Zion and were obliged to settle in the north-western quarter of Jerusalem, where they bought the monastery of St. John from Georgian monks. And the pilgrims were obliged to pay exorbitant amounts to obtain permission to visit the city and the Holy Sepulchre. No new buildings were constructed after the middle of the 17. century, and the city was described as a ghost city with many ruins, dirt and decay.
Europe was in this period more engaged in its own religious and national wars than in Jerusalem and its fate. There was, however, an interest from the great powers to establish relations with the Turkish Empire. And in negotiations a number of treaties, so-called capitulations, were established, according to which the European powers obtained consular privileges in the Levantine cities, especially in Egypt where the distance from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea was short across the Isthmus of Suez, making it possible to make a short cut to India. The first capitulation was signed between Francois I and Turkey in 1535, it was renewed with an alliance in 1604, and in 1621 Louis XIII as the first European king appointed a consul in Jerusalem. In the 18. century Russia began to have an interest in defending the Greek-Orthodox church, because the Russian tsars conceived the Russian State as a successor state to the East-Roman Empire, Byzantium, with obligations towards the Christian institutions. In 1774 a treaty was contracted between Turkey and Russia after a defeat incurred against Catherine the Great (1762-96).
In the 17 and in the 18 centuries a renewed interest in the Middle East was awakened in Europe, and a number of travellers, not primarily being pilgrims, visited the Near East and often came to Jerusalem. To mention a few, the Roman nobleman Pietro della Valle, who travelled in 1614-26 and even married in Bagdad; the English Richard Pococke, later bishop, who travelled in 1737-38, Robert Wood and James Dawkins, who visited Syria and Lebanon, and who wrote a book “The Ruins of Palmyre” (1757) which became a great success and had an enormous importance for the applied arts in Europe. Or, to take Danish travellers, the above mentiond Theodor Petræus, who visited Jerusalem between 1655 an 1659; captain Frederik Ludvig Norden, who was sent to Egypt by King Christian VI, where he travelled 1737-38, and who wrote a famous book on Egypt; and finally, last but not least to be mentioned, Carsten Niebuhr, whose Danish expedition to Arabia in 1761-67, when he also travelled in Egypt, Yemen, Persia, Syria, Palestine with Jerusalem and
107 Turkey, became immeasurably important for the exploration of the Old Near East, not the least the later decipherment of the hieroglyphs and the cuneiform writing.
The soil was fertilized for the new interest in the Middle East, which was inaugurated with Napoleon’s great French Expedition.
108 10
Next Year in Jerusalem Modern Jerusalem The modern period in Jerusalem was triggered by Napoleon’s campaign to Egypt in 1798. This campaign was the beginning of a race for the Levant between the European powers and was to all intents and purposes a new crusade. The interest in the Levant this time, however, was first and foremost power politics and imperialism, and not religious faith – in contrast to the crusades in the Middle Ages. Jerusalem was still, from a geo-political view, situated in a hinterland, like the city was in the Bronze Age, and was certainly not in focus for imperialist interests. But in the course of the 19 century a race developed primarily between Great Britain and France for influence on the Turkish Empire, where from the British point of view the concern was primarily to secure the communications with India, the most precious possession in the British Empire, while France primarily wanted to hamper the British ambitions, but also had their own colonial ambitions. Eventually also religious considerations played a role, especially in the latter half of the 19. century, and primarily in Great Britain.
The campaign to Egypt was planned by the French government, the Directoire, and was led by Napoleon, who had just conquered Italy, and whom the Directoire preferred to have outside Europe. Napoleon led an expeditionary force of 328 ships with a total of 38.000 men. But the most important contingent was, seen from our point of view, a number of scientists and artists, with the help of whom Napoleon wished to explore and colonise Egypt. The troops debarked in Abukir July 1798, and from a military point of view the expedition at the beginning at least was a great success. In the course of only three weeks Napoleon gained supremacy; but the campaign then turned into a failure. First his navy was destroyed by Admiral Nelson at Abukir August 1, and the Mediterranean coast was closed by naval blockade. As the route back across the se was barred to Napoleon, he tried to lead the army towards Syria and Istanbul. It ended in a useless campaign in Palestine, where he reduced Jaffa and Ramlah and tried to capture Acre, from where he had to withdraw, when the army was hit by the plague, and Acre at the same time was supported by the British navy. It is characteristic for both the situation of Jerusalem in this period and for Napoleons egotistical mind, that he did not bother to visit Jerusalem but stayed on the coast. In the end Napoleon broke the
109 English blockade with a few men and came back to France in 1799. His army was forced out in 1801.
From a strategic point of view the whole campaign was a mistake, but it had the after-effect that the government in Istanbul realised that it was impossible to govern Egypt directly, accordingly the Ottoman sultan appointed the Albanian Mohammad Ali as governor in 1805. Where Great Britain, at least in the beginning of the period until the 1850s was mostly interested in trade, there was a strong cultural penetration from the French side in cooperation with Mohammad Ali as an offshoot from the scientific part of Napoleon’s expedition. At the same time Mohammad Ali used French engineers and civil servants to change Egypt into a modern state, independent from the Turkish Empire. In the second half of the century, however, the British government got a solid grip on Egypt and Sudan, not the least when they took over the Suez Canal in 1875, and it now became vital to England to rule Palestine, because this land is the hinterland to the canal; also Palestine has always been within the sphere of interest to any power ruling Egypt, as was seen already in the Late Bronze Age.
But Napoleon’s campaign had weakened the Turkish sultan’s power also in other provinces than Egypt. In 1808 the Muslim inhabitants in Jerusalem made a rebellion against the Ottoman governor, and the Holy Sepulchre was burnt. As a result of the rebellion the leading families of the city acquired more influence on the Turkish rule.
Mohammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, broke away from the Turkish sultan and made Egypt into a de facto independent state. In the years 1831-40, together with his son Ibrahim Pasha he expanded his power to Palestine, Syria and parts of Asia Minor. He made a certain order in Palestine with a modern bureaucracy, and by introducing modern methods of cultivation he expanded the agricultural area and intensified the production, which made Palestine into an exporter of grain. The plan was to make Palestine and Syria the bread basket for Egypt, and in the following decades Palestine was in earnest incorporated in the international trade and was, incidentally, opened to foreign penetration.
But at the same time the Egyptian rule became unpopular because of conscription of soldiers; because of the long service it was regarded as certain death to be called up, and this triggered a
110 rebellion in 1834 against the Egyptian regime with its centres in Nablus and Jerusalem. This is a notable and important incident, because in fact it was the first manifestation of national feelings with the Palestinian people. The revolt was brutally suppressed, but it was the end of Mohammad Ali’s dreams of developing Egypt into a great power, because the European powers helped Turkey to regain the rule over Palestine in 1840.
In exchange for the help from the European powers the Ottoman government gave concessions to establish consulates in Jerusalem, a sign of a reborn interest in the city. The first was a British consul in 1839, next came a French consul in 1843, further Sardinia and Prussia in 1843, USA in 1844, Austria-Hungary in 1849, Russia in 1853, and also Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Protugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Persia placed consuls there. These consuls had jurisdiction over the particular citizens of their country, and on top of this France and the Britain took turn to be protector of the Jews living in Jerusalem.
Towards the end of the century also Germany entered the stage and tried to gain influence and build an empire. German companies gained concessions to build the railroad from Istanbul to Mekka, and the German emperor posed openly as the protector of Jerusalem during his visit there in 1898, when the wall next to the Jaffa Gate was broken down to allow the German emperor to ride into Jerusalem on horseback without having to ride through the narrow, winding and covered gate. It is thought-provoking, that when General Allenby entered Jerusalem at the same place, he walked on foot, having been ordered so from above and having been forbidden to ride like the German emperor, and hypocritically with a Bible in his hand.
Together with this political penetration came the cultural, religious and human immigration to the country. It is instructive to study the virtual race between the various Christian denominations and the Jewish organisations to manifest themselves in the city after ca. 1840; all this mirrors the reawakened religious interest in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, both inside the walls of the Old City and outside the walls, was invaded by a host of institutions, all of which thought they had a special relationship to the city. Added to the traditional institutions, which had existed in the city since Antiquity and the Middle Ages, for example the Holy Sepulchre, the status of which was confirmed by the sultan in 1852, came orphanages;
111 schools; monasteries; religious printing offices; hospitals – with the purpose of converting Jews to Christianity; banks; residential areas; mosques; churches; and another Sepulchre, the so-called Garden Tomb north of the Damascus Gate, “found” and promoted by British and American religious circles.
And finally of course there were also scientific institutions in connection with the exploration of the archaeology of Jerusalem. This exploration began with Robinson and Smith from USA in 1834 and French surveys in the 1850s (F. de Saulcy and M. de Vogüé), but after Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865, serious work began, first started by C.Wilson from 1863, but after him under C.Warren from 1867, when the first real excavations in Jerusalem began (cf. fig. 2). They were clearly inspired by the British aspirations to dominate Palestine: “The land of Palestine belongs to you and me; basically it is ours” (the archbishop of York). Until the Great War 22 big and small explorations were conducted by European and American archaeologists, among which the most important were the discovery of the original Jerusalem south of Haram el-Sharif on Ophel with the Spring Gihon and the Siloam Tunnel.
All this is of course a new “crusade”, first peaceful, but in the course of the Great War a real crusade, aimed at wrest the Holy Land from the Turkish Empire.
Demographically by far the most important penetration was the Jewish immigration with the ideology “Zionism”. This movement aiming at a return to Palestine for the Jews, had, after some initiatives in the 1840s and in particular Moses Hess’ book “Rome and Jerusalem” from 1860, its real political birth at the first Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1897 under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, where it was decided to create a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine. Zionism cannot be understood without the European nationalism which has dominated politics from Napoleon until today, and without the European imperialism, which regarded the rest of the world outside western civilization as lawful booty.
There was earlier some immigration to Palestine and Jerusalem, and to take an example, the first houses outside the walls of Jerusalem were built by the English Jew Montefiori in 1855-60 to house poor Jews in Jerusalem. Also there was immigration after pogroms in Russia, which at the time included Ukraine, the Baltic States and Poland. The pogroms began after the murder of Tsar
112 Alexander II in 1881, where a rumour implicating the Jews was spread. In the years 1890-91 around 20.000 Jews were driven out of Moscow. In the years from 1881-1903 20.000-30.000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in the so-called First Aliyah (aliyah means “going up”, immigration to the Holy Land).
Again in the years from 1903 to 1906 pogroms took place in Russia, creating the Second Aliyah with a new immigration. In Jerusalem the number of inhabitants in 1850 was: Muslims 5.400 Christians 3.600 Jews 6.000 Making a total of 15.000 inhabitants who all lived inside the walls.
But in 1910 the numbers were: Muslims 12.000 Christians 12.900 Jews 45.000 Making a total of 69.000 inhabitants, of whom only a minority lived inside the walls.
The real tragedy was that at the same time as the Zionist ideology was created, the Arab nationalism, which had emerged in connection with the rebellion against Mohammad Ali in 1834, was strengthened, and in 1891 the first organised protest against Jewish immigration was put forward to the Turkish government, in which the government was asked to make a halt to immigration and sale of land.
113 11
This is God’s House. Everyone is safe here19 The mandate and Jerusalem under Jordan The renewed western imperialism in the Levant culminated during and after the Great War, when Turkey in 1917 definitively lost the hegemony over the Arab world, and the Turkish Empire disappeared. Germany, who together with Turkey and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire lost the war, was barred out from the Levant, and the Arabs were cheated by Great Britain and France.
In July 1915, Sherif Ali Ibn Hussein, the ruler of Mekka, in a letter to the British Government suggested the establishment of an Arab Kingdom, comprising Arabian Peninsular, Transjordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. In exchange he promised to support the allied cause with an Arab insurrection against the Turkish rule. This letter was answered favourably in a letter from Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, on behalf of the British Government, a promise confirmed, when the archaeologist T.E.Lawrence, later the famous Lawrence of Arabia, or el-Aurence, as the Bedouins called him, was sent to Hussein as liaison officer at the resurrection against the Turks.
At the same time negotiations were conducted at a lower level between the British and the French Governments, represented by Mark Sykes and Georges Picot respectively. An agreement was reached, aiming at dividing the Arab world, giving the French a free hand in the northern Levant, and Great Britain a free hand in Iraq, while Syria (the Jeezirah and Arabia) should be an Arab state, albeit under French sovereignty as for the northern part, and British sovereignty as for the southern part, while Palestine officially would be a mandate from the League of Nations with an international administration agreed upon with Russia and other allies; this special arrangement was made because Russia would not tolerate that, the holy places in Jerusalem came under French, that is Roman- Catholic control, a renewal of the Russian policy from the 18 century. This agreement was later put into effect, except for the parts concerning Palestine, primarily because Russia after the Bolshevik revolution had no say in the Middle East.
19 King Abdullah entering the Haram. Quoted from Gilbert 1996 p. 248.
114 The treason towards the Arabs, which was the result of the Sykes-Picot agreement from 1916, will be remembered in the Arab world for a long, long time. In excess of this the British foreign minister Arthur Balfour in 1917 promised Palestine to a third party, the Zionist Jews, issuing the so-called Balfour Declaration:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”20
This was part of a letter sent November 2, 1917 from the British foreign minister Arthur Balfour to Edmond Rothschild, a prominent English Zionist, and it has acquired a standing in international law, which is absolutely inexplicable put with regards to its original status, as a letter from a minister to a private citizen. Especially remarkable, seen in the light of the later developments, are the words “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The communities in question are the Christian and Muslim Arabs primarily, they comprised at the time 90 % of the population, and they owned 98 % of the land, while the Jewish minority comprised 10 % of the population, owning 2 % of the land. This is remarkable because beyond any doubt the euphemism “a national home” in the declaration thought of a future state. Such a letter is of course not taken out of thin air, and the later Israeli president Weizmann had, before the letter, had negotiations with Balfour. But everybody was careful not to define the borders of the home. A little later, however, in 1918, David Ben-Gurion and Yitshaq Ben Zvi issued a book, where they described “our land” with borders ranging from Litani in southern Lebanon, Hermon and Wadi Awaj just south of Damascus towards the north, to Aqaba in the south, and from Wadi el Arish in the west to Amman in the east. Later in a memorandum from 1919, Balfour stated, that “in Palestine….we do not, not even formally, wish to examine the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700.000 Arabs, who now inhabit that ancient land.”
20 Quoted after B.Morris 1999 p. 75.
115 The Arab world were slow to protest against the Balfour declaration, but when it became known in Palestine in November 1918, around 100 prominent Palestinians declared open enmity against it, stating that they had “ always sympathised profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries …..there is a wide difference between this sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation …. ruling over us and disposing of our affairs”21. The protest witnesses that the Palestinians understood the true meaning of a “national home”. These are the people, which the later president Weizmann did not wish to meet, when he in 1918 met with the Hashemite King Feisal in Ma’an. As a group he considered them to be “dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and unpatriotic”.
Meanwhile the war against the Turks was continued, and in December 1918 the British General Allenby conquered Jerusalem.
The whole issue was settled at a conference in 1922, where Sir Winston Churchill, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, set the tone. France acquired a mandate over Syria and cut Lebanon, a small state with a narrow Christian majority, out of this land. Hussein’s sons Feisal and Adullah were given Iraq as a kingdom and Transjordan as an emirate, later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, respectively, while Great Britain retained Palestine for itself as a mandate.
A British census in 1921 showed the population of Jerusalem:
13.500 Muslims 14.900 Christians (primarily Arabs) 34.000 Jews making a total of 62.400 inhabitants
In the period of the mandate the development gained speed; a growing number of Jews immigrated to Palestine, and British efforts to slow the stream were in vain. In 1929, when the first serious troubles from the Arab side took place, Palestina had 17 % Jews, in 1936 30 % and in 1945 after the Second World War, 33 %, still, however, with ownership to only 5,66 % of the land. Jerusalem in 1931 held:
21 Quoted after B.Morris 1999 p. 76.
116 19.900 Muslims 19.300 Christians, primarily Arabs 51.000 Jews making a total of 90.900 inhabitants, the city had now by far outgrown the old walls.
The Nazism in Germany with its virulent and deadly Anti-Semitism created an increased pressure on Palestine, and in 1936 triggered an Arab revolt, which became so serious that a “Royal Commission” under Lord Peel, the so-called Peel-Commission was appointed to find a solution for this eventually insurmountable problem. The Peel-Commission delivered its proposals in July 1937: Palestine was to be divided into a small Jewish state, comprising the Coastal Plain, the Valley of Esdraelon, and Galilee, and a larger Arab state, to be united with Transjordan. Jerusalem (with Bethlehem) and a corridor to Jaffa should remain British mandate, in popular wit dubbed “La promenade Anglaise”. The Arabs were divided in their view of the partition scheme, while the Zionist leaders agreed to the solution and proposed a partition. Neither the Zionist nor the Peel- Commission’s plans were realised. The Arab revolt, culminating in an Arab occupation of Jerusalem, was subdued, and the Arab leaders were sent into exile.
The Second World War created a stalemate, but at the same time new pressures for immigration. At this time, in 1946, Jerusalem held:
33.700 Muslims 31.400 Christians 99.300 Jews making a total of 164.400 inhabitants.
A civil war between the Arabs and Jews broke out, while both parts at the same time fought the British authorities, and at last the British government caved in. April 2. 1947 the British Government announced, that Britain gave up the mandate and delivered it back to the United Nations and asked the General Assembly of the United Nations to find a solution to the future governing of Palestine.
117 A commission was appointed, which in the end proposed a partition into two states, and Arab and a Jewish, while Jerusalem, where at the time 100.000 Jews and 65.000Arabs (among whom 25.000 Christians) lived, should be a demilitarised and neutral city with an international governing body and a governor responsible to the United Nations. The plan was adopted November 29.1947 with 33 votes for, 13 against and 10 abstaining. It was said of Jerusalem: “The city of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations”.
This plan was, however, never carried through, because both parties, Jews as well as Arabs, sabotaged it, to put it mildly, one need only to mention the murder of the mediator from the United Nations, the Swedish Count Bernadotte, who was assassinated by a terrorist group, lead by Shamir, who was later to become prime minister in Israel. The unrest had the result that the city after the armistice April 4, 1949 was partitioned, the Old City remaining Arab. The Jews who had lived there before, were not allowed to return to the Old City, while the western suburbs were cleansed from Arabs and became part of the new state Israel, which had been proclaimed on May 14, 1948. The armistice line has since been known as “The Green Line”. On January 23, 1950 the Israeli government declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel, a move which, however, is not yet recognized by most countries.
On April 24, 1950 the West Bank and East Jerusalem were annexed by Jordan in order to put an end to the power vacuum there. The partition of Jerusalem was now a fact. But partition did not entail peace. An example of the violence which also after the partition characterized Jerusalem was the murder of king Abdullah of Jordan. He visited Jerusalem July 20, 1951 and entered Haram al-Sharif together with his grandson Hussein Ibn Talal to pray in the Aqsa Mosque. He entered, probably on purpose, through the gate of Shadows from the north like the caliph Omar in 738; the Muslim ownership of the Rock, where Abraham had sacrificed Ismail should be confirmed. Many security officers surrounded the king; he asked the soldiers to leave, but the commanding officer said that the protection was necessary. “This is God’s House,” answered the king, “everyone is safe here”. He had hardly said it, before he was cut down by a Palestinian assassin, while Hussein, later to be king of Jordan, watched it horrified.
118 In the course of time there were great tensions in the area, most seriously the 1956-war, and also later Israeli military raids on Jordan, while there was an active guerilla warfare on the side of Arab with so-called fedayeen fihters. And finally, in 1967, Israel conquered its neighbours in a preventive strike and occupied the Jordanian West Bank with Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
In August 1967 Israel annexed the Arab parts of Jerusalem and widened the territory of the city considerably making it into a large city. This unilateral annexation has not been diplomatically recognized by other countries, not even USA. At this time the inhabitants of Jerusalem numbered:
58.100 Muslims 12.900 Christians 196.000 Jews making a total of 267.000 inhabitants.
119
Fig. 18. Jerusalem 1994. Both the present boundaries of the city and the “Green Line” are shown.
120 Since then a number of Jewish settlements have been erected on Arab land, both in and around Jerusalem and in the occupied territories, obviously because there has been a wish to annex and incorporate the whole West Bank into Greater Israel, and perhaps especially to prevent that Jerusalem will become capital in a future Palestinian State.
But all efforts to integrate the different ethnic and religious groups into each other have failed, if anything the city is more divided today than from 1948-67, and in later years the relative proportion of Jews in Jerusalem has fallen. In 1983 a census gave as result:
108.500 Muslims or 25.34 % 13.700 Christians or 3.2 % 306.300 Jews or 71.5 % making a total of 428.500 inhabitants.
In 1995:
182.700 Muslims or 29.7 % 14.100 Christians or 2.3 % 417.100 Jews or 67.9 % making a total of 613.900 inhabitants.
Finally in 2000: 196.900 Muslims or 30.2 % 14.200 Christians or 2.2 % 439.600 Jews or 67.5 % making a total of 650.700 inhabitants.
The occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem has triggered two revolts, so-called intefadas. The Palestinians want a state, and one of the important bones of contention is the status of Jerusalem,
121 where the Palestinians want a partition like in the years 1948-67 and East Jerusalem as the Palesinian capital; while the Jews in Israel want a whole Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, there seems, however, a willingness to give the Arabs sovereignty over the Muslim religious monuments there.
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If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither away; let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.22 Epilogue I this book I have tried to explain, how it has come about, that Jerusalem, which geopolitically is situated in a hinterland, and which because of that in itself has had neither economic nor communication-wise importance, nevertheless has become a great city, and at the same time has become the bone of contention between three world religions, the adherents to which each claim to have a historical claim on the city.
The Jews have a claim, because Jerusalem demonstrably for the first time was made capital in a state under King David and his successors, and because Jerusalem in the Exile to the Jewish people in Babylonia, as well as in Northern Mesopotamia and Egypt was the focus of Jewish aspirations and hopes. At the same time it is obvious that regardless of their actual citizenship Jerusalem has, since Antiquity been the place which Jews all over the world regarded as their home, and religious home town; this may be seen alone from the several periods, when Jews after their death let their bones be sent to Jerusalem to be buried there in ossuaries. At the same time today it has become paramount for the Jews to have their own sovereign state with a capital – anyone, who does not understand this wish, should read Martin Gilbert’s great work on the Second World War, where the Nazi persecutions and cruelties are enumerated practically day by day.
The centre of Jewish worship is today the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall, or as the Jews call it Haqqotel – the Wall. This wall is the west façade of Herod’s temple platform, and here Jews have been praying since the destruction of the temple, they were not allowed entry on the platform. This habit was suspended 135-638, when Jews were denied access to Jerusalem at all. Along the wall Süleyman the Magnificent established a small piazza in the Arab quarter, later called Moghrabiyye,
22 Psalm 137,5-6.
123 this little square was after 1967 made into a large open space partly by the expropriation of 80 houses and deportation of the owners across Jordan River. To day it is by far the most important rallying ground for Jews in Jerusalem, in reality in the whole world.
A number of Jews – and also quite a few Christians – wish to recreate the temple of Jerusalem and a reinstatement of the sacrificial cult, which has been in the centre of Jewish faith since Ezekiel; we have met this wish during the war of Bar Kochba in 132-35, under Emperor Julian Apostata in 363 and during the Persian invasion 614. Today, when the responsible politicians and prominent rabbis have the Temple Mount in physical possession, they have all the same refrained from this, and they have let the Muslim religious authorities retain their ownership of the Haram al-Sharif, under the protection of the king of Jordan. But there is always the danger that fanatical groups will try to carry out a sabotage of the religious buildings there. Already several plots to destroy the buildings on the Haram planned by members of the organization settlers Gush Emunim have been frustrated. Already in June 1967, when the Israeli army had taken the Haram, the Army Chief Rabbi suggested, that now the Israelis had a historic chance to remove the Dome of the Rock. Such a move will also be met with sympathy among many Christians outside the great churches, just remember the attempt to burn the Aqsa Mosque in 1968, made by an Australian Baptist.
The Christians have a claim, because so much of Christian faith – rightly or wrongly – is centred around the events at Easter, when Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and also around Pentecost, when the Christian Church was born, even if I personally regard this cult of “the place” as a religious atavism. Today, however, the Christians do not harbour territorial claims for Jerusalem, this kind of imperialism is definitively dead after the Crusades in the Middle Ages and the modern “Crusades” of the 19. and 20. centuries. But at the same time it is impossible from a western Christian viewpoint to neglect, that the violent conflict between Palestinians and Jews in Israel/Palestine is an indeed very important component in the broader Arabian animosity towards the west and in the terror which has grown up against the “Crusaders” – Salibin, as the Christians are often called in connection with conflicts in the Middle East or terrorist activities elsewhere in the world. Rightly or wrongly the state of Israel is viewed upon as the last major imperialist venture from the west. And of course it is an obvious Christian interest to mediate in the bitter strife between Jews and Muslims for the right to Jerusalem, and somehow try to de-escalate the conflict, and possibly find a way to internationalise Jerusalem with its many holy places. In this connection it
124 is a major tragedy to see, how the indigenous Arab Christians are squeezed between the warring factions and in growing numbers move away; this will eventually entail, that the Christian Churches and holy places will become merely tourist attractions without real religious and spiritual contents.
And the Palestinian Muslims have a claim (and together with them also the Christian Arabs), because their actual possession of Jerusalem (and Palestine) has been the most enduring, in fact from Emperor Hadrian until today, a possession in fresh memory among the Palestinians, whether they live in Israel in the occupied territories or in their Diaspora and their refugee camps, a claim supported by deeds of land and houses and other proofs of ownership, even if they have been driven away be the help of expropriations. And also a claim because of the many legends, attaching Ahraham – their eponymous ancestor – and Muhammad – their prophet – to the city. It is these legends, centred around Haram al-Sharif, which at least up to now has made it impossible for the Israelis to expropriate the Haram and rebuild the temple. Just how sensitive the issue of the Haram is, could be seen, when the Israeli authorities opened an old water tunnel leading along the western flank of the Haram. This was reacted upon, as if it was an attack on the Arab holy place, remembering that the whole of Haram is a mosque – a place for prayer, according to Muslim perception and custom. And any change in status quo is dangerous, which may be seen also from the many protests in connection with the building of a subterranean mosque in Solomon’s Stables.
And then – at the end – a couple of words about one of the constant religious themes connected with Jerusalem – the eschatological hope, formulated already by the prophet Ezekiel and later by the author of The Revelation of John. Jerusalem is for all three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the place where the final events in the history of the world and the final judgement shall take place. Of course all conflicts between the parties become even more bitter, when people have the fundamentalistic belief, that the exact words in the Bible or the Koran in reality also describe God’s final plan with the world.
This goes for the ultra-orthodox Jews who will abolish the Muslim buildings on the Haram, rebuild the temple and reinstate the sacrificial cult – partly supported by politicians like Prime Minister Sharon, who triggered the last intefada with his visit there.
125 But also – and not in the least – the Christian groups, who one-sided support Israel from a dubious reading of the Old Testament. It was some time ago possible to hear a prominent fundamentalist Christian on the television-program “60 minutes”. He wished for a final war to break out for Palestine, because this war would entail the victory of Christianity on earth; of course most of the Jews in Israel would be killed, as he said, but the survivors would convert to Christ.
And finally fanatical Muslims, the Islamists, with their wish to recreate a Muslim theocracy with Sharia as its law, a theocracy, which will encompass the earlier Muslim caliphate in it full extent. And which shall make way for a wider extent of the rule of Islam.
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Further Reading As I wrote in the preface, this book is not a scientific work, and accordingly there is not any documentation in notes except for a few instances, where I have quoted directly. Otherwise much of the information is of course taken from secondary literature; the problems of the history and archaeology of Jerusalem are so varied and complex that my own research in primary sources cover only a fraction of the facts and theories given in the book. A full list of literature used is given at the end of the book. The literature on Jerusalem is completely overwhelming, and this chapter is not an exhaustive account of the extant corpus, but only meant to be a help for further study. The proposals derive from my own reading and work on Jerusalem, and are as such often contingent and certainly not exhaustive; the proposals may seem biased to some readers for which I ask their indulgence.
Chapter 1 General accounts of the history of Jerusalem are, especially concerning the early period, outdated due to the intense modern archaeological and topographical research in and around Jerusalem, but some still give many useful details, e.g. Michel Join-Lambert: Jerusalem from 1957 dealing with the history until the Crusades, or J.Gray: A History of Jerusalem from 1969 going all the way up to the present day. The newest and very erudite book is Karen Armstrong: A History of Jerusalem – One City, Three Faiths from 1996. It has a good list of literature and gives a lot of useful information on religious and theological discussions on the development of Jerusalem and its importance. A fine overview is found in Dan Bahat: The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem from 1989 and in the smaller Carta’s Historical Atlas of Jerusalem from 1973, giving a number of historical and topographical maps with commentary. A series of critical essays on the early period of Jerusalem is found in Thomas L. Thompson: Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition. Copenhagen International Seminar 2003. A broad popular history of the Biblical lands is found in Roberta L.Harris: Exploring the Bible Lands from 1995. An introduction to the archaeology of Jerusalem is found in E.Stern (red): The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land,Vol. 2 from 1993, it also brings maps with finds from
127 the various archaeological periods, the entry is written by archaeologists, who were all involved in the exploration there. The older exploration is described in C.Warren and C.R.Conder 1998 (1884). The Survey of Western Palestine. Jerusalem from 1984 reissued 1998. Further in L.H.Vincent: Jerusalem sous terre, 1909; Jerusalem Antique I-II from 1912 and 1926) and L.H.Vincent & A.M.Stève: Jerusalem 1-2, 1954 and 1956. Macalister’s excavations from 1923-25 are published in R.A.S.Macalister and J.G.Duncan: Excavations on the Hill of Ophel, Jerusalem 1923-1925 from 1926. Recent excavations are now being published, but there are a number of preliminary reports and sometimes popular accounts from the excavators’ hand, e.g. Kathleen M. Kenyon: Jerusalem, Excavating 3000 years of History from 1967 and Digging up Jerusalem from 1974. Avigad’s excavations in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City are described in N.Avigad: Discovering Jerusalem from 1983 and now in the final publication H.Geva (ed.): Jewish Quarter Excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem I from 2000. Kenyon’s and Tushingham’s excavations are published in a series called Excavations in Jerusalem, 1961-67; the most important for this book are Volume I written by D.Tushingham in 1985, and Volume II written by M.Steiner in 2000. Mazar’s excavations south and west of the Haram are described in B.Mazar: The Mountain of the Lord from 1975, see also Y.Yadin (ed): Jerusalem revealed from 1975. Y.Shilo’s excavations are published in the series Qedem from Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University; important is Y.Shilo: Excavations at the City of David from 1984 (Qedem 19). C.J Wightman: The Walls of Jerusalem from the Canaanites to the Mamluks fra 1993 deals with the walls through all periods of the history, while K. Biberstein und H.Bloedhorn: Jerusalem, Grundzüge der Baugeschichte vom Chalkolithikum bis zur Frühzeit der osmanischen Herrschaft fra 1994 gives a complete overview of the study of the archaeology of Jerusalem. Additions 2014: Montefiori, S,S. 2011. Jerusalem. The Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson gives a full and up to date history of the city; while Nitza Rosovsky (ed): City of the Great King, Jerusalem from David to the present Harvard University Press, 1996 gives a series of essays on Jerusalem and the impact of the city on the culture.
Chapter 2 Jerusalem in the Bronze and Iron Ages is best found in M.L.Steiner: Excavations by Kathleen M. Kenyon in Jerusalem 1961-67, Volume III, Sheffield 2001, (Sheffield Academic Press).
128 For the date and nature of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob see J. Strange: Geography and Tradition in the Patriarchal Narratives from 1997. Additions: For city -states in Palestine in the Bronze Age see John Strange: Tha Palestinian City- States of the Bronze Age in Mogens Herman Hansen (ed): A Comparative Study of Thirty City- State Cultures, 2000 (Copenhagen C.A.Reitzels Forlag). For oliveoil production, see D. Wengrow: Egyptian Taskmasters and Heavy Burdens: Highland Exploitayion and the Collared-Rim Pithos of the the Broze/Iron Age Levant. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 15, 1996, pp-307-26.
Chapter 3 The inscription from Dan mentioning the house of David has given an intense debate. See latest N.P.Lemche: ”House of David: The Tel Dan Inscription(s)” in Th.L.Thompson: Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition from 2003. A critical view of early Israel and Jerusalem in the Iron Age is given in I.Finkelstein and N.A.Silberman: The Bible Unearthed from 2001. The temple of Jerusalem (Solomon’s temple as well as the succeeding) is treated admirably in C.Meyers: Temple, Jerusalem in D.N.Freedman (ed.): The Anchor Bible Dictionary Vol 6 pp. 3500-69. The chief work is Th.A.Busink: Der Tempel von Jerusalem 1-2 from 1970 and 1980, vol. 1 deals with Solomon’s temple, vol. 2 with the temples of Zerubbabel and Herod. In J.Strange: Theology and Politics in Architecture and Iconography from 1991 I have studied the temples of Salomon, Ezekiel, Zerubbabel, Herod’s temple, Constantine’s Anastasis Church and the Dome of the Rock with special emphasis on the iconography. For the problem of cherubim and Jahwe’s throne see T. Mettinger: The Dethronement of Sabaoth from 1982. Further reading on the temple of Ezekiel’s vision may be found in J. Strange: Architecture and Theology from 1989.
Chapter 4 The period from Aleksander til Bar Kochba is exhaustively treated in E.Schürer: The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C. – A.D.135): a new english version, revised and edited by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar, literary edited by Pamela Vermes, Vol. I-III from 1973- 87; also important is M.Hengel: Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien zu ihre Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh. V. Chr. from 1969. For the broader historical background I like to point to Cambridge Ancient History vol. IX and X.
129 Chapter 5 The standard work on Herod is A. Schalit: König Herodes fra 1969; but easier to read is P. Richardson: Herod from 1999. Shorter to read on Herod and Jerusalem is J. Strange: Herod and Jerusalem: The Hellenization of an oriental city from 2003. A small and popular book on Jerusalem in this period is J.Wilkinson: Jerusalem as Jesus knew it, Archaeology as Experience from 1978. Again for further reading see Cambridge Ancient History vol. X
Chapter 6 On early Christanity see Niels Hyldahl: The History of Early Christianity. Studies in the Religion and History of Early Christanity 3. M.Avi-Yonah: The Jews of Palestine - A Political History from the Bar Kohkba War to the Arab Conquest from 1976 is an exhaustive overview over the relations between the Jews and the Romans and Christians from the second Jewish war until the Arab conquest.
The Holy Sepulchre in the light of the new excavations in connection with the restoration is described in a popular way in Ch. Qoüasnon, O.P.: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, 1974. Broader it is written in V.C.Corbo: Il Santo Sepolchro di Gerusalemme I- III from 1981. The History of the tomb itself from the beginning until present day is now available in M.Biddle: The Tomb of Christ from 1999.
On Golgotha itself see Sh.Gibson & J.E.Taylor: Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Jerusalem from 1994. The texts from Eusebius: Vita Constantini are found in L.H.Vincent & F.- H.Abel: Jerusalem Nouvelle from 1914. On pilgrims in Jerusalem se J.Wilkinson: Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades from 1971, also giving Breviarius og Sofronius’ Anacreontica, further Egeria’s Travels from 1971. The text of Anacreontica is given in H.Donner: Die anakreontischen Gedichte Nr. 19 und Nr. 20 des Patriarchen Sofronius from 1981. The Madaba-map is best described in H.Donner & H.Cüppers: Die Mosaikkarte von Madaba I from 1977, but is available in M.Avi-Yonah. The Madaba Mosaic Map from 1954. See also M.Piccirillo: The Mosaics of Jordan from 1992. For Jerusalem in the later part of the Byzantine Period see O.Grabar: The Idea of the Holy from 1996.
130 Chapter 7 For early Islam (and bibliography) see A.Hourani: A History of the Arab Peoples from 1991. Muhammed and his life was treated authoritatively in Frants Buhl: Muhammeds liv (Life of Muhammad) from 1903 (German edition 1929). A highly critical view may be found in Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim from 1995. The best modern study of Jerusalem in the early Arab Period is O.Grabar: The Idea of the Holy from 1996, but see also O.Grabar: The Formation of Islamic Art from 1973. Important for the understanding of the buildings on the Haram is M.Rosen-Ayalon: The Early Islamic Monuments of al-Haram al-Sharif from 1989. The relationship between the Dome of the Rock and earlier monuments may be found in N.N.N.Khoury: The Dome of the Rock, the Ka‛ba, and Ghumdan: Arab Myths and Umayyad Monuments from 1993. Guy le Strange: Palestine under the Moslems from A.D 650 to 1500 from 1890 gives a good selection of texts concerning the Muslims and Jerusalem. The Arab legends and traditions connected with the Haram are studied in J.Retsö: ”Tempelpladsen i Jerusalem i Islams traditioner” from 1979. Additions 2014: A thorough overview of the Arab conquests is given in Hugh Kennedy: The Gret Arab Conquests 2007 ( Philadelphia: Da Capo Press). Amonumental and exhaustive account of the Dome of the Rock is : S.Nuseibeh and O. Grabar: The Dome of the Rock,1996 (London: Thames and Hudson).
Chapter 8 My standard reference book to the Period of the Crusades is Steven Runciman: A History of the Crusades 1-3 from 1965. Andrew Jotischky: Crusading and the Crusader States from 2004 is highly readable and gives the newest research. The Arabic view of the period is given in Amin Maalouf: Les croisades vues par les Arabes from1983. For the special problem of holy war see P.P.Reid: The Templars from 1999; and for the fortifications I can recommend T.S.R.Boase: Castles and Churches of the Crusading Kingdom from 1967. Jerusalem in the Crusader period is described in A.J.Boas: Jerusalem in the Times of the Crusades from 2001.
Chapter 9 The Mamluk Period is shortly but adequately described in D.Bahat: The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem. The Encyclopaedia of Islam vol. VI gives an overview of the Mamluks with
131 bibliography. The definitive work on Mamluk Jerusalem is M.H.Burgoyne: Mamluk Jerusalem. An Architectural Study from 1989; the work is an exhaustive survey and publication with good chapters on the Mamluk State and Jerusalem under the Mamluks. The same high standard has the comparable work for Ottoman Jerusalem S.Auld and R.Hillenbrand: Ottoman Jerusalem. The Living City: 1517-1917 from 2000.
Chapter 10 John Marlowe: Perfidious Albion from 1971 (London) studies the Anglo-French rivalry until 1850. The relations between the Arabs and the Zionists is treated in N.J.Mandel: The Arabs and Zionism before World War I from 1976. The chapters on Jerusalem in K.Baedeker: Palestine & Syria from 1876, giving a picture of Jerusalem before the modern development is separately printed in 1973. Jerusalem’s political history from ca. 1500 until today described in detail in B.Wasserstein: Divided Jerusalem – The Struggle for the Holy City from 2001. Jerusalem’s history in the 19. century is told in M.Gilbert: Jerusalem. Rebirth of a City from 1985 and in Y. Ben Arieh: Jerusalem in the 19th century. The Old City from 1984.
Chapter 11 The best modern guide to Jerusalem is K.Prag: Jerusalem from 1989. Jerusalem’s history in 20. century is told in Martin Gilbert: Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century from 1996. The history of Jerusalem is of course inseparately bound up with the history of Palestine as a whole in the 20. century and the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians. The literature on this conflict is overwhelming, but a few titles may be given. B.Morris: Righteous Victims. A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-1999 from 1999 is interesting, because it represents a new revisionist writing of history. Highly readable is also B.Kimmerling & J.S.Migdal: The Palestinian People from 2003, it gives a fine chronological overview. Finally I can recommend A.La Guardia: War without end. Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for a Promised Land from 2003. H.Cattan: Palestine, the Arabs and Israel from 1969 is interesting from the point of view of international law, and the special role of the United Nations. Ph.Knightley and C.Simpson: The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia from 1969 (Thomas Nelson & Sons, London), is a detailed account of the Arab revolt against the Turkish Empire and the political consequences after the war.
132 Palestine under the mandate is treated in T.Segev: One Palestine Complete from 2000. The Six day war in 1967 is retold in J.Bowen: Six Days. How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East from 2003.
133
Jerusalem – important years
Village on Ophel (shortlived) between 4500 and 3000 BC City walls, proper city (shortlived) 1800 - 1700 Jerusalem in the Amarna Age ca. 1350 David, Chiefdom ca. 950 Jerusalem’s temple is built between 900 and 750 Sankerib conquers Jerusalem 701 Nebukadnezer destroys Jerusalem 585 Kyros conquers Babylon 538 Zerubbabel rebuilds the temple 520 – 515 Nehemias rebuilds the walls of Jerusalems ca. 445 Alexander takes Jerusalem 332 Battle at Banyas, Jerusalem under Antiochia 198 Antiokus Epifanes installs Zeus-alter in temple 168 Temple reconsecrated (Hanukka) 165 Pompejus conquers Jerusalem 67 Herod 37 BC – 4 AD Temple restored og enhanced 20 BC– 63 AD First Jewish War 66-73 Titus conquers Jerusalem 70 Second Jewish War – first attempt to rebuild temple 132 – 135 Constantine becomes sole ruler 324 Second attempt to rebuild temple – under Julian Apostata 363 Persian invasion – third attempt to rebuild temple 614 Omar conquers Jerusalem 638 Abd el-Malik builds the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque 685-91 Hakim destroys the Martyrion 1009 The Crusaders take Jerusalem 1099 Saladin retakes Jerusalem 1187 Süleyman the Magnificent takes Jerusalem 1517 General Allenby conquers Jerusalem 1917 Partition of Palestine 1948 Israel conquers Jerusalem 1967 1. intefada 1987 Oslo-agreements 1993 2. intefada 2000 Jerusalem capital of Israel and Palestine ?
134
List of literature used in the book Armstrong, K. 1996. A History of Jerusalem – One City, Three Faiths. Random House. Avigad, N. 1983. Discovering Jerusalem. New York. Thomas Nelson. Avi-Yonah,M. 1976. The Jews of Palestine. Oxford: Blackwell. 1954. The Madaba Mosaic Map. Jerusalem. Baedeker, K. 1876. Palestine and Syria. The Chapter Jerusalem reprintet 1973 by Carta. Jerusalem. Bahat, D. 1973. Carta’s historical atlas of Jerusalem. Jerusalem. Bahat, D. 1989,1990. The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Carta. Barnett, R.D. 1975. A Catalogue of the Nimrud Ivories, 2nd edn London. 1982. Ancient Ivories from the Middle East. Qedem 14. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology. Ben-Arieh, Y. 1984. Jerusalem in the 19th century. The Old City. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ben-Dov, M. 1975. The Area South of the Temple Mount in the early Islamic period. I Jerusalem Revealed p. 97-101. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Ben Tor, A. 1992. The Archaeology of Ancient Israel. Yale University Press. Biberstein, K und Bloedhorn, H. 1994. Jerusalem, Grundzüge der Baugeschichte vom Chalkolithikum bis zur Frühzeit der osmanischen Herrschaft. TAVO B nr. 100. Wiesbaden. Biddle, Martin. 1999.The Tomb of Christ. Rupp-Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd. Biran, A & Naveh, J. 1993. An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan. Israel Exploration Journal 43, pp. 81-98. Boas, Adrian J. 2001. Jerusalem in the Times of the Crusades. London and New York: Routledge. Boase, T.S.R. 1967. Castles and Churches of the Crusading Kingdom. London: Oxford University Press. Bowen, J. 2003. Six Days. How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East. New York: Simon and Schuster. Buhl, F. 1998. Muhammeds liv (Life of Muhammad) from 1903 with notes from 1929, revised by F.O.Hvidberg-Hansen. Poul Kristensens Forlag. German edition 1929. Burgoyne, M.H. 1974. The Continued Survey of the Ribat Kurd/Madrasa Jawhariyye Complex in Tariq Bab al-Hadid, Jerusalem. Levant VI, pp. 51-64 1987. Mamluk Jerusalem. Broadhust Hill: Scorpion Publishing Limited.
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